Russian Rain

The long lecture on the depressing state
of contemporary writing,
delivered both in Russian and in English,
took up the better part of the afternoon.

When it was finally over,
I went back to my room and lay
on a narrow bed with a horsehair mattress
listening to the rain

or the "language of the rain,"
as the poets of today like to put it,
every drop a "syllable," they write,
or more ridiculously, every drop a "vowel."

The "idiom" of the rain
the "text," even the "discourse" of the rain--
how much more of this can one endure?

The lecturer was a long-faced man,
an editor whose brown-tinted eyeglasses
might have contributed to his pessimism.
He said that he had wasted his life
reading 5 million pages of unpublishable writing.

His translator was a beautiful woman
who sat at a chewed-up table
while he paced the room
bemoaning the fact that most Russians
have neither the money to buy a book
nor the time to write one--

something I mulled over ineffectually
while I lay on my back pretending
to be a carving on the tomb of a martyr,
arms crossed on my chest,
listening to the rain outside the windows.

Naturally, there in St. Petersburg
the rain was speaking in Russian,
falling in Cyrillics into the empty courtyard,
which is why I could not understand
a thing the rain was saying,
though at one point I thought I heard
the word for ice and much later when the wind picked up
the word for train station.

When the rain finally stopped
I lay in bed some more
listening to the sad Russian cries of the birds
that were slicing the air over the rooftops.

It reminded me how much I missed home--
its English-speaking rain, and particularly
the long lectures of its old English-speaking maples.

Billy Collins