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Rainbow in green valley

One Poem by Nathaniel Perry

March

Yesterday, when I came home
from work there was a rainbow.
It’s the kind of thing one hesitates
to write about. You know

it’s remarkable—all those gaudy colors
set down in the stubble field
and arcing up into the greyshine
blue of sky that’s yielded

its clouds to light. But how do you get
it right without overblowing
the thing? You’re always a half step away
from unicorns with rainbows—

and that’s the thing with recording the world,
no one will believe you
if you actually get it right. The bird
that sings to me all through

the spring, whose song I know as if
it were my own, I can’t
describe to anyone (much less
the internet), so the slant

of its melody is all I have.
If I tried to use metaphors
to describe it you would probably laugh
at my syrupy rainbow words,

and if I tried to sing it to you
here, you’d close the book
I’m sure. It’s hard to handle singing
in a book. So I am stuck

not knowing what bird it is because
it is so beautiful.
Does that make sense? I hope it does
because I think that’s all

I can say about it at this point
without unmaking my point.
But to get us back to the rainbow, I
saw it drop and anoint

the smallish valley where the creek
begins to assert itself
as a creek in earnest when I stopped the car
to check the mail. The shelves

of color arranged themselves into
the field like birdsong. I thought
for a second that the rainbow actually
had an end. But then I caught

myself in my fantasy and remembered
that everything was the same
as always, just color had given a moment
its unbelievable name.

 

 

 

Nathaniel PerryNathaniel Perry is the author of two books of poetry, Nine Acres (APR/Copper Canyon, 2011) and Long Rules (Backwaters, 2021). Recent poems and essays appear in Image, Ecotone, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He is editor of the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review and lives in rural Virginia.

Read three poems by Nathaniel Perry previously appearing in Terrain.org.

Header photo by Jeff Stamer, courtesy Shutterstock.