TRANSCRIPT

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

When I was younger, I frequented many jazz clubs up and down the east coast. I have fond memories of leaning forward at low-lit tables with friends. The musicians I was drawn to played hard bop or modal. The music taught me to listen to form and to the spirit of improvisation.  

Where others heard screeching, I heard freedom and possibility. Where others felt only sheets of chaos, I felt a nimble mind at work, soloing. 

I hear in today’s poem that same spirit of riffing and casting forward in expressive notes. The speaker progresses by way of shifts and variations that ultimately arrives like a jazz solo. It’s where I find solace in movement and truth, in an embrace of simplicity.

The Rain, Life, and Other Things
by Leah Umansky

                                                        after Tiana Clark and Pádraig Ó Tuama

My sister tells me, don’t get caught in the rain, but I don’t mind
a little damp, a little dampening. Stories can start in all sorts of

places, and so many things are possible at once. I mind the sitting, 
all the small urgencies, the indoors, and lately all I really want is

movement and walking and simplicity, and to turn off my brain,
all those thoughts, and my wanting. Why is it always seeking

and sifting, liking and striking? It is exhausting to keep up with
everything. Sometimes, I see the pink flowers on the park path

and sometimes I don’t. A friend texts me that I should take a 
break from dating, and I say if I do, then I am nowhere, I am just

aflutter in the day of my own mind, wondering about the what-ifs
and the hows and the whens, and how am I going to meet someone,

(how?) if I focus so much on myself; I am good at it. I feed my soul
what it wants. I am always ravenous.
 
                                                                                                            When I am walking,
the pink flowers punctuate the green, and the sky is sick with gray;

rain will come, but I am just putting one foot in front of the other,
and I am not worried. I see that pink and I think about how pink

was never a favorite color of mine; it’s too coated, too thick, full
of suggestion, of implication and of blush. I am thinking of my

two lives, which has come up again, how they are one and the same,
whether I like it or not, but—I like it. I do. I think about the verbs

that contain my life and how saturated they are; how pink (or piqued).
I am listening to a poem about verbs. It is exhausting just to listen to 

their work, just to step to the thought itself; this life is just exhausting. 
It has been a year of physical, mental, emotional, psychological

social, comical, medical, logical, lyrical, stoical, magical, radical,
optical, atypical, typical, historical, methodical, tragical, invisible,

and classical magnitudes. Classical. Classical. Yes, you have to laugh
at the tragedy of it all; sometimes nothing matters, but the movement

of your mind, your footfalls falling into place; your right before your left;
Don’t get stuck in the rain, says my sister, but, I think,
                                                                                                     I want to. I look at the quiet
sky, its gray and drab, and the trees are singing in their green, and I am

grateful for their color; I am here, looking at the pink roses I pass as I turn, 
and curve back to 72nd Street. The turning point comes when the eye returns,

when the I returns, and here I am looking inward, looking to this poem I 
haven’t written yet and the one I am listening to, and I think about where 

I belong while trying to ground myself. Then, I come to the trestle, 
(or what I like to call “the undergrove”), and begin a text to the poet,

but I stop myself, for there is no immediate need; I mean, I write the text
because I want to, but then I copy it into an email, letting it stretch over time,

and as I pause and sit on the bench outside, I realize nothing is immediate;
nothing needs so much; and as I sit there, relaxing, I put on my favorite

Chris Cornell song, “Higher Truth,” to settle me, and when I look
up from my phone, I am suddenly part-witness: there is a chorus line

of ten runners on the bench opposite me, all in workout clothes
stretching in unison, in front of the pink roses, all in sync, like a dance.

It is a public choreography: right ankle over the left knee, twothreefour,
then left ankle over the right, twothreefour, I smile and begin to get up

and walk out of the park when I see them stand and reverse, left hand 
on the back of the bench, right pulling the right hamstring back,

like a bird. I, too, pull myself back, out of my racing. I look. I see; I
remember my own remembering: look more. And I send that email.

                                                                   I think to myself, you never regret a walk,
and I take a photo of those pink flowers so thirsty for my breath. Hello, 

I say to them, and I look up at the sky thinking: there’s a sunset there
somewhere behind those clouds. So many things are possible at once. So

many things are possible.

“The Rain, Life, and Other Things” by Leah Umansky. Used by permission of the poet.