Shopping Cart
    items

      August 30, 2022Driving in the RainChristopher Shipman

      Image: “Blueprint of a Dream” by Jaundré van Breda. “Driving in the Rain” was written by Christopher Shipman for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, July 2022, and selected as the Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
      Fun fact: during a thunderstorm
      more raindrops fall than there are people
      in the world. You can look it up.
      I’ll wait. Go ahead. But I won’t bother.
      My eight-year-old daughter—
      everything she says deserves to be believed.
      Besides, I’m driving. It’s all true
      anyway. Oz is over the rainbow. Just listen
      to the tautology of water. Just look
      at the summertime street—how it stretches
      its torrid tongue beneath us.
      A ghostly heat up ahead flails infinite arms.
      We watch the rain fall, offering
      platitudes in torrents. She says Blue Bird
      (our Prius) can handle it. I know
      the small human in back who says it
      can handle it. The way she takes in the sky
      over Benjamin Parkway—I’d
      call it a bruise and be done with it. She uses
      the opportunity to remind me that
      girls see more shades of color than boys.
      Now she insists it’s her favorite
      shade of purple. This sky the same she used
      for a surreal sketch of her mama’s face
      before we left the house. Now
      she dangles a bracelet made with a friend—
      late birthday present. The purple
      meretricious gems. The fake feather barely
      hanging on even with the windows up.
      And just like that, she grows
      taciturn, silent as the drenched blur of trees
      scrolling by. I try not to, but I wonder
      if she sees in her reflection
      a semblance of how fractured we all end up.
      How momentarily whole. How we
      spread ourselves thin as we go. Raindrops
      down a windowpane in a movie
      about grief, we’re reshaped—smudged over.
      Each of us a palimpsest with a pulse.
      At the risk of sentiment, I’ll say nothing
      is meretricious. Nothing is fake.
      It’s all true. Inside every face a palatial sky.
      Go ahead. You can look it up.
      I’ll wait beneath the rain of platitudes.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the editor, Timothy Green

      “Ekphrastic poems are often the most impressive when they manage to both clearly be inspired by the source artwork and also stretch the image far into a surprising direction. Christopher Shipman does that here, with a gorgeous poem full of memorable lines and more twists and turns than I can count. I didn’t see a face behind rain-soaked glass, but now I do.”