If the rain is everywhere and it is we will soon
be taking to the boats and carrying with us only
our most precious and lightest things: the birds,
in pairs or in flocks, two or three photos,
the complete poems of Dickinson, the young,
dog and the old, and the air around
us and in us, which contains all that we are
and everything we can hope to recollect.

&

Kathleen Jesme’s latest collection of poems is Albedo. She is the author of four other collections of poems, including Meridian and The Plum-Stone Game. “[If the rain is everywhere]” was published in TLR’s 2014 Fall issue, Women’s Studies.