‘After the Rain’ and Other Poetry by Jared Carter

After the Rain

After the rain, it’s time to walk the field
again, near where the river bends. Each year
I come to look for what this place will yield—
lost things still rising here.

The farmer’s plow turns over, without fail,
a crop of arrowheads, but where or why
they fall is hard to say. They seem, like hail,
dropped from an empty sky,

Yet for an hour or two, after the rain
has washed away the dusty afterbirth
of their return, a few will show up plain
on the reopened earth.

Still, even these are hard to see—
at first they look like any other stone.
The trick to finding them is not to be
too sure about what’s known;

Conviction’s liable to say straight off
this one’s a leaf, or that one’s merely clay,
and miss the point: after the rain, soft
furrows show one way

Across the field, but what is hidden here
requires a different view—the glance of one
not looking straight ahead, who in the clear
light of the morning sun

Simply keeps wandering across the rows,
letting his own perspective change.
After the rain, perhaps, something will show,
glittering and strange.

Reprinted from Darkened Rooms of Summer. Jared Carter’s most recent book of poems is The Land Itself, from Monongahela Books in West Virginia.

Healing

All it takes is time. A blister
_____develops on
Your palm, corpuscles minister,
_____and it is gone

Within the week. The earth itself
_____regenerates,
And color springs from that deep shelf
_____or barren waste

Come back to life. In this way each
_____remembered face
Or wave approaching some far beach
_____falls into place.

reprinted from Peacock Journal

Jared Carter is a poet living in Indiana.