Ekphrastic photo on Paterson's "Rain"

[Photo: Big Frank Dickinson]

Big Frank has written a considerable amount of ekphrastic poetry. Most on Edward Hopper Poems that Big Frank wrote poems to accompany. Now Big Frank turns it all around. Once again, he has taken a photo in an ekphrastic expression of the poem. He woke up this morning to a hard rain on his roof. Big Frank loves the sound, the drumming of the drops of the rain (heavy and repeating) on the wooden roof of his home. He thought of "Rain" by Don Paterson, which he had just read the night before. So he grabbed his camera and on his way to work (yes, Big Frank does have a day job) he shot photos and the one above is the one he thought most evocative of this poem.

RAIN
by Don Paterson

I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face;

one long thundering downpour
right through the empty script and score
before the act, before the blame,
before the lens pulls through the frame

to where the woman sits alone
beside a silent telephone
or the dress lies ruined on the grass
or the girl walks off the overpass,

and all things flow out from that source
along their fatal watercourse.
However bad or overlong
such a film can do no wrong,

so when his native twang shows through
or when the boom dips into view
or when her speech starts to betray
its adaptation from the play,

I think to when we opened cold
on a rain-dark gutter, running gold
with the neon of a drugstore sign,
and I’d read into its blazing line:

forget the ink, the milk, the blood—
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters

and none of this, none of this matters.