Rain All Night, Paris
On the road home the tide is rising.
Riding the road-tide is dangerous
but it’s not safe to stand still.
Hang on the verge & you drown.
I’m going along for the tide.
I may see more riders further on.
Drowning must wait till I get there
and who knows who might be waiting
with a flashlight, a thermos,
even a raft or canoe.
“Rain All Night, Paris” from SPRINGING: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Marie Ponsot, copyright © 2002 by Marie Ponsot. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
“Rain All Night, Paris” was included in Marie Ponsot’s Springing: New and Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). About finding inspiration as a poet, Marie Ponsot wrote in her April 2000 Q&A with Alfred A. Knopf readers, “Sometimes a subject haunts me until I find a way to begin to write it. Sometimes I start with a line or phrase, often worded as an image. Such lines often occur to me while I’m out walking idly around. (New York is a fine city for walkers. It’s full of sounds, odors, sights, lots of sensual events, to which one may pay close heed or no heed at all.) What I then begin to want to do is write.”
Marie Ponsot
The author of numerous works, Marie Ponsot won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her collection The Bird Catcher (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2010 to 2014.