Happiness

The Rain

by Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley

All night the sound had

come back again,

and again falls

this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself

that must be remembered,

insisted upon

so often? Is it

that never the ease,

even the hardness,

of rain falling

will have for me

something other than this,

something not so insistent—

am I to be locked in this

final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,

lie next to me.

Be for me, like rain,

the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-

lust of intentional indifference.

Be wet

with a decent happiness.

I have always loved the number of meanings found in this poem. The sound of rain and the many references and images it conjures combined with the bitterness of one's own vices. This combined with the very literal sexual imagery makes for a very complete picture of what love and happiness can mean in one's own life.

I often think of this poem when I consider the concept of happiness and how in so many ways we stand in our own way. How often do we simply refuse to be happy and how often are we drenched in a happiness that is beyond our control? When is the happiness something that takes over us rather than something we provoke?

I am constantly looking for this legitimacy in everything. I have realized that more often than not I am only unhappy because I have absolutely made up my mind that it can be no other way. And at other times the sadness is so legitimately bitter that it turns into an ethereal kind of emptiness that swallows me in it's darkness.

These are quiet, persistent, and dark times for me these days. There's so much waiting for me in the not so distant future while there's also so much tearing at me as I pull away. In the end I am occasionally displeased. With all of it, but customarily hopeful that things happen for reasons I will rarely grasp but that are ultimately good for me and everyone else. And in saying so I sometimes grasp an understanding of what hope is and try my best to make sense of it. The issue here is that hope is not something that can be logic-ed. Hope is for the irrational, the impossible, and the best of dreams. I cannot hope to understand it, but like happiness am afraid that I will simply talk myself out of it again and again.