Thirteen Ways of Listening to the Rain

Abstract

Thirteen Ways of Listening to the Rain Robert Anthony Siegel (bio) “I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.” —Wallace Stevens 1. My mother and I sat listening to our breathing over the phone. If I asked a question, she gave the shortest answer possible, placing the words down with slow exactitude, like a row of coins scrounged from the bottom of her purse. “Did you get out for a walk today?” I asked. “To the fruit stand.” The stand on the corner was the limit of her territory now, the border of her remembered world. Beyond that corner, she couldn’t find her way back. “What did you get?” “Bananas.” She had been an overwhelming talker in the old days, hyperfluent, hungry for attention, unfiltered, exhausting. It was awful, but better than this. “You used to talk more than anyone on the planet,” I said now, trying to sound amused— playacting for myself, not for her. “It was a veritable tsunami of words. You could drown people. You did drown people.” “Now I like to be quiet.” I shifted in my seat, unsure what to do. Silence had always meant anger in our family, but now it just meant silence. For a thing to be so exactly what it was— nothing less and nothing more—it was as if she had somehow stepped outside the cage of language and was standing beside it, peering in. 2 At the time, I was living in a small city in Virginia, in an apartment building by [End Page 52] the railroad tracks. After one of our calls, I would go downstairs and walk beside the freight cars as they dreamed past, like children’s blocks the size of houses, an unthinkable, dark weight sleeping inside them. Here, here, here, they sang, and then gone, gone, gone, and then there was nothing but the sound of my breathing filling the cold street. 3 A part of me recognized that I could give in and let the phone line stand empty between us for a few minutes, that it would hurt no one, that it would be like moonlight in a darkened room. But another part of me became electric with fear and began to talk about anything, everything, trying to fill us up with words. 4 I told my mother about the hike my wife Karen and I took outside of town: the long gravel road, then the path that wound steeply upward through the trees, a sort of green tunnel, and the deer down by the stream at the bottom of the ridge. And when I couldn’t come up with anything more, I finally asked, “And what have you been doing?” “Me? I went hiking on the mountain.” “Mom, you’re in the middle of Manhattan. There is no mountain.” “But I do have a mountain, and I hike there.” For a second, I thought she was making fun of me, and then I wasn’t sure what to think. “There is no mountain on Twenty-third Street,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “If there is no mountain, how do I hike on it?” It was dark and starting to rain, long heavy drops that glowed in the light of the streetlamp below my window. She was filling in the gaps with whatever bits of language she could scavenge from our conversation, trying to cobble together a bridge that could take us from here to there without falling. “Well, I see your point,” I said. “It was a very nice hike,” she replied. 5 Karen and I had walked in silence, breathing hard because the trail was steep. The trees met at their tops to form a sort of latticework roof, and the light filtered down, bluish-green, the color of silence. No sound from the outside; our own footsteps inaudible. The feeling was of enclosure: a winter garden filled with a forest, or maybe a memory box by Joseph Cornell the size of the world. It contained a creek and a little wooden bridge at the bottom of the ravine and then a...