Return to Cezanne's Carrot Home Page
Image for Rain at the Holiday Inn Express

Rain at the
Holiday Inn Express

A poem by Thomas R. Smith

Droplets on the window multiply to a steady patter, then pelting, then liquid slabs sliding sideways against the exterior wall of the motel. Thunder like some disproportionate judgment.

Lightning exposes radiant contours of the snapping sheets of rain. Downspouts pour small cataracts against the horizontal grain of the storm.

We turn out the room lights and watch the dazzle buffeting the night screen, the drama of the wind over newly planted cornfields, thin green lines scribbled incoherent by swarming pencil-tips. Rain, velocity, and darkness blur the fast-food oases, gas stations flourishing the bait of freedom, the giant mouse in red lederhosen climbing the Cheese Chalet, signs along the highway reading THIS LAND AVAILABLE FOR DEVELOPMENT and FUTURE SITE OF RYAN'S FUNERAL HOME, that home that is not our home.

The slant rain overwhelms all of these, confuses them with a saving indeterminacy, which we can taste. Amid this violent conformity, certain particles, wet sparks, the reckless ones, somehow freer than the rest, move in other directions. . . .

Copyright Thomas R. Smith

divider

Photo of Thomas R. Smith

Thomas writes:
"Rain at the Holiday Inn Express" was written about ten years after "Spiral Weeds Under the Water," but both poems tell essentially the same story. I write poetry in order to find a degree of internal freedom not ordinarily granted by our society, a common quest for artists irrespective of culture. An element of grace sometimes enters when one has established, through whatever one's discipline, that measure of internal freedom. Grace could be defined in this context as reasonable grounds for hope.

Thomas R. Smith is the author of several books of poems, most recently The Dark Indigo Current (Holy Cow! Press, 2000) and Winter Hours (Red Dragonfly Press, 2005). His self-published anti-war chapbook, Peace Vigil: Poems for an Election Year (And After) will be available for the duration of the Bush administration. He lives in River Falls, Wisconsin, and teaches at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.

Photo by Phil Pfuehler. Reprinted by permission of the River Falls Journal.

Return to Poetry index

About Cezanne's Carrot Literary Journal and Website Current Issue of Cezanne's Carrot Literary Journal Submission Guidelines Community: Connect With Others Resources: Links to Other Spiritual/Visionary Sources Make a donation Past Issues of Cezanne's Carrot