A Rain Symphony

Gathering the music of my days

Photo by Max Bender on Unsplash

February 

–4–

Brahm’s First Symphony
driving through fields of green and brown
continuous rain and windshield wipers
rushing to keep up
with base and bassoon
clarinet and oboe
a timpani of thunder and lightening
as we walk past the lighthouse at Asilomar
violins tiptoeing between tidepools
where black and red crabs
as small as my pinky finger
pick their way over rocks and empty shells
the crescendo back home as I slam
my palms down on the desk
Now I know why you get scared when I get angry
and in the quiet that follows
when everyone has left and the day empties
I hear Henry in the next room
jump off the bed and skitter
a toy mouse across the floor
spirit cat

---

I rarely listen to music. I like silence when I’m working and don’t really think of turning the radio on in the car when I’m driving. So when Summer at

Unsolicited Press

asked the 2025 authors to come up with a playlist for their books, I had no idea what I would do—until I started looking through my book …

Music is everywhere! In this poem¹ above and in many others there are references to all kinds of music, from Chopin, Rossini, Schubert, Rachmaninoff, and Bernstein, to Adele, Abba, and George Harrison, to Mads Tolling, Etta James, Kev Choice, and Nina Simone. We attend the Oakland Symphony and are huge jazz fans. Music is definitely one of the pieces of my life.

If you would like to listen to some of the songs mentioned in Gathering the Pieces of Days, you can listen to the playlist I created by clicking on the Spotify link below. And you can check out the book itself at Unsolicited Press, Bookshop.org, or Tertulia.com.

Thank you for reading, thank you for listening, and thank you for your support.

1. This poem was originally published as “Rain Symphony” in Loud Coffee Press, Winter 2023, https://www.loudcoffeepress.com/lcp-issue-12 and appears in Gathering the Pieces of Days as “February - 2” (Unsolicited Press, 2025).