{"id":1936,"date":"2013-09-04T10:43:06","date_gmt":"2013-09-04T18:43:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/?p=1936"},"modified":"2013-09-05T15:30:59","modified_gmt":"2013-09-05T23:30:59","slug":"dan-lamberton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/?p=1936","title":{"rendered":"Dan Lamberton"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Abundance of Rain<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I have some confessions to make\u2014
\nthey have to do with this century
\nand how much I don\u2019t want to be led
\nalong by it any further. They have to do
\nwith today being nothing about tomorrow,
\nbut, rather, about history and how
\nall I know is before me, that is, before
\nI was, and I confess that
\nI search through old photographs
\nfor reminders of who I am. If the people
\nin early Nebraska somehow hung pictures
\nof their old homes in Virginia
\non the sod walls above their gritty beds,
\nand I am the grandchild made through them,
\nthen I still carry their dissolved walls
\nin me, and I confess I want mostly what is past.<\/p>\n

Granted, we live in two directions. There should be,
\nfor the young, the chance to make children. But once
\nmade, have them look backward. Start
\nwith pictures of the unclothed, with Eakins\u2019 nude men
\nalong a tug-of-war rope, their haunches in the grass,
\nand their heels dug in, and their arms showing they\u2019re no
\ndifferent from me. A little differently muscled perhaps,
\nmore formed by old work, by scythes and stone boats,
\nbut they look like I do and they died. But first they enjoyed
\nthemselves. And look next at unclothed women, Muybridge\u2019s
\npanels of them, pouring water on each other\u2019s heads,
\npicking up children. They have nothing Victorian
\nabout them. They lived through all that and survived.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a haystack, \u201c1947, Near Norfolk, Nebraska,\u201d
\nin a Wright Morris photo. And I know that
\neach of those straws were arranged
\nby the physics of elbows
\nand the leverage of hayforks
\nand that elbows and hayforks
\ndepended upon the occasional abundance of rain.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s it. It\u2019s about rain, and how I am
\ndrawn back into it. Remember how we lay
\ntogether, in that wood-paneled room near Seattle
\nwith rain washing down so hard we felt
\nwhat we were doing was cleaned the second
\nit happened? It\u2019s not that our future was rain,
\nbut that its sound was a sound we both knew,
\nthat took us out to itself and we heard, \u201cThere
\nhas always been rain and there has always, therefore,
\nbeen you. Even more, there have always been
\nnumberless thousands of you, not just
\nnow, not just all of you now who are blind,
\nbut there was always this sound, rain\u2019s and yours,
\npounding the outside and inside of walls
\nlike these, and the Indians\u2019 leather walls,
\nand the hopeless poor people\u2019s walls,
\nand also, alas, the walls of all those
\nwhose ears are closed and who think
\nthey\u2019re creating the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

“The Abundance of Rain” is reprinted from a broadside by Ian Boyden, Crab Quill Press.<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dan Lamberton has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington and has published poems nationally in journals and magazines such as Sojourners, Northern Lights,<\/em> and Poetry Northwest.<\/em>\u00a0He is the author of On the River through the Valley of Fire: The Collaborative Ceramics of Frank Boyden and Tom Coleman<\/em> <\/a>(American Museum of Ceramic Art, 2008). His essay, “Randlett’s Roethke: \u00a0It Was All So Visual” \u00a0considering Mary Randlett’s late photos of Theodore Roethke, appears in the 2013 Spring & Summer Photography issue of Poetry Northwest.<\/em><\/a> Lamberton has delivered, throughout the state, over 60 lectures on Washington’s poets for Humanities Washington.<\/a> He has also lectured in Seattle for the Teachers as Scholars program, sponsored by the Seattle Arts and Lectures Series, and has taught a summer course at the University of Washington called \u201cA Sense of Where We Are: Literature and History of the Pacific Northwest,”\u00a0and\u00a0completed a northwest literary history anthology in cooperation with the University of Washington history department.<\/a>\u00a0Dan is Professor of English and Humanities Program Director at Walla Walla University.<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Abundance of Rain   I have some confessions to make\u2014 they have to do with this century and how much I don\u2019t want to be led along by it any further. They have to do with today being nothing … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[61,29,505,122,69,40,8,1],"tags":[651,652],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1936"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1936"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1940,"href":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1936\/revisions\/1940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kathleenflenniken.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}