Issue Thirty-Six - Summer 2020

The Sound of Rain Outlives Us

By B. J. Wilson

My grandfather, ninety-two, wakes and sleeps again as I read him Keats, but Li-Young Lee holds him for a while. I read, “The Gift,” where the father pulls a splinter from his son’s palm. I read, “Eating Alone,” where the son mistakes a spade for his late father waving in the garden. I read, “My Sleeping Loved Ones.”

And I wonder how to answer what he’d asked me: “Where is the Lord in your search through art?” When he wakes, he chants as if he could still dry the dishes, sunlight in his hands, poets on his lips: You furnish your parts toward eternity! . . . you furnish your parts toward the soul!

He asks me about Jesus in long breaths that feel like his last. Hadn’t He come into my heart? “When I was a boy, Grandpa,” I assure him, again, his eyes too impaired to see that mine have moistened. Then I read from “Rain Diary,” until we hear it fall, patter on the window the poem that lulls us all to sleep.

Copyright Wilson 2020

B. J. Wilson is the author of two poetry collections, Naming the Trees (The Main Street Rag, 2021) and Tuckasee (Finishing Line Press, 2020). His work has appeared in The Blue Mountain Review, Burningword Literary Journal, The Louisville Review, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University, a writing fellowship from the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, and a Pushcart nomination for his poetry. B.J. is also a songwriter and vocalist, and his books and music can be found at bjwilsonpoet.com. To get by, he teaches high school English in western Kentucky.

All work by