Summer Rain

Abstract

Summer Rain Bruce Smith (bio) Keywords poetry, Bruce Smith, summer It's all butter and butter theft, thunder and the sloppy nature of goodwill. It's all distress and excess, having it outover home. The train station, the new cathedral. The cathedral, the theater of murder, American on Americandifferences and distances, when some liquid machine starts to slant the world, sets shadow in motion, a skyblue tarp the new heaven, rain on skin the new numen, pepper spray at the borders the new sentiment,the new outcast fate. Two shoes ruined, chewed by shepherds of the devil, the vamp and tongue demolished likewhat Nina Simone did to a song, cleaving it to/from home. How long before the outsoleis ripped from the pink insole and the shank a leathery flag of your surrenderto all the parts of speech that fail to represent objects, subjects, states or qualities?Air swarms to a certain density that appears [End Page 555] as One you hurried to when you were trouble,Dickinson said her mother wasn't. And of her father: the oldest and oddest sortof foreigne. A sweater and water, the new father and mother, Republican and ghost, a far-fetchedthing replaced with law or storm or idle kindness from afar. [End Page 556] Bruce Smith bruce smith is the author of six books of poems, most recently, Devotions, a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Award, and the winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize. Copyright © 2017 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.