From Paterson's book "Rain"

[Photo: Big Frank Dickinson]

Don Paterson has a new collection of poetry out entitled "Rain'>. It is a beautiful collection of poems - both gorgeous on the surface, and probing in its depths. Big Frank encourages all of you to go buy this - if you buy one book of poetry this year buy this. Here is one poem out of it.

The Rain at Sea
by Don Paterson

Aye, maybe I did resent
your home in every element.
But did you know, when you were one

with the dance or dive or ride or run
and lost to water, earth or air
how lost you were to me? Or care?

Let me tell you how it was.
We'd stopped four miles outside Montrose
to let the southbound train slip by.

It was evening, and the sea and sky
were one blue flag, with no design
but for the darker bluer line

where the upper rested on the lower,
and one small cloud ten miles offshore.
The cloud had drawn up to a halt

to leave the sea a gram less salt.
It poured down on no rock or ship
but just upon its own dark shape,

combing out its rain like wool,
like a girl her hair above a pool;
or else (all I could do was sit

before the scene, and worry it)
the sea reached up invisibly
to milk the ache out of the sky.

While I was reckoning the strange
intimate far-off exchange,
the feeling took an age to name.

It was an awful creeping shame.
Nothing on earth was ever less
concern of mine than that caress,

if such a human word would do
for what I saw; and worse, I knew
the whole sea fixed me in its stare.

How did I blunder into here?
There would be all hell to pay.
I turned and shut my eyes and lay

my head against the growling glass
and waited for the train to pass.