Weather, Or Not

The rain was relentless today. I stood in the small, barely covered area that serves as my front porch and watched it fall. The wind slanted it away, and it splashed complex patterns in the puddles it formed on the parking lot. The first line of a poem came to my mind: There must be a woman behind all this rain. The poem was called "The Solid Rainfall, Breaking" and I'm sorry to say I don't remember the poet's name. Internet searches on the title and first line return nothing.

The poem was in an issue of the revived version of William Carlos Williams' little magazine from the 1930s, Contact. It was published from abut 1959 to 1965, and edited for some years by Evan S. Connell. I had several issues in my house. The poem was accompanied by a nice photograph of a rainy scene in a New York City park, and I can't recall who the photographer was either. I hadn't looked at the magazines in years, but I thought of them now and then and intended to dig them up someday to peruse them them again. I don't suppose I'll ever read that poem again now, but I'm sure the first line will come to mind frequently.

Evan S. Connell does show up in Google results, but those results told me that he died in 2013. So recently, and I had missed hearing about it somehow. He was memorialized in the weblog of Harper's Magazine, but I don't follow that, though I am a subscriber to the print edition. If his passing was noted there I didn't see it. Another ending. His magazine was a considerable influence on me during the early 1960s.

Another poem came to my mind this evening, after the rain eased up. It was Yvor Winters' "The Manzanita" and I wish I could post it as my Sunday verse, but I can't find it anywhere on the Internet. This is the shadow of the vast madrone is the final line, which is all I remember at the moment. If I had saved one book from that fire i'd wish it was my volume of Winters. But since I can't find it on the Internet I'll settle for another, though I think I've posted it here before.


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There was a break from the rain today, but it remained gray and chilly. Odds are we won't see the sun again until Thursday, which is supposed to be only partly coudy. The rain is su re to be back tomorrow and again on Wednesday, with increasing wind. This aprtment gets very noisy when the wind blows over it, probably due to the flat roof. After Wednesday the possibility of rain will remain for every day through the 21st. That's as far as the long range forecast goes, so I'm guessing rain will be possible through the entire month. It's going to get dreary here.

Since I'm going to be stuck here the next two days at least I went out this afternoon and got a burrito from Taco Bell, but first I stopped at the Goodwill store and bought a book. Their selection was not impressive, but I did find one anthology of poetry that has a number of the poems I lost copies of to the fire. It's not a very good anthology, but I'm not in a position to be choosy. It is a trade-sized paperback and probably belonged to a CSU student who had to buy it for a Freshman English class and never cracked it, because it looks close to pristine. Two bucks for my first book in this place is not bad.

Because I ate that burrito about six hours ago I'm probably going to make a snack before I go to bed, but I can't decide what. I'm afraid I've bought too much serious food and not enough frivolous food since I moved in here. I might have to settle for some cinnamon toast and hot chocolate. Maybe a shot of rum in the chocolate, since I have no whipped cream or tiny marshmallows. Rum is a good substitute for those, right?

There were more rescued and sighted cat pictures published today, but none I recognized. I did find out through a comment in one thread that there are five feeding stations being maintianed on my block. One of them has a field camera with footage fo nocturnal feeding by some cats, but the trapper maintaining it says all but one of the cats in the video have been identified and are not mine, and I can tell that the one that hasn't been isn't either. I'm starting to suspect that if any of my cats survived they must have taken off for other parts of town. I couldn't blame them. It wasn't the best neighborhood.

I'm using the LJ icon that shows me in 1986 with some of my books on the shelf behind me. All of them burned, as did the calander hanging next to me. The calander came from a Japanese restaurant in Alhmbra, and had some very nice photos of Japanese gardens in it. I'd like to go back to 1986 and get another copy, and some of the excellent food they had at that restaurant. Then I would stay there and refuse to move to Butte County. Fool me once....