The light after the rainstorm was perfect—low and golden, lighting up the horizon and filling the sky with rainbows. Rainbows are harbingers of spring and signs of good fortune, patience, peace, connector of realms, or hackneyed, relegated to cliché, like sunsets, like bad attempts at photographing the moon, all made paler by the attempt to capture. But I love this Delmore Schwartz poem, and I loved that night, while, unexpectedly out getting coffee and paper towels, I found a brilliant and lingering rainbow.
"A tattering of rain and then the reign
Of pour and pouring-down and down,
Where in the westward gathered the filming gown
Of grey and clouding weakness, and, in the mane
Of the light’s glory and the day’s splendor, gold and vain,
Vivid, more and more vivid, scarlet, lucid and more luminous,
Then came a splatter, a prattle, a blowing rain!
And soon the hour was musical and rumorous:
A softness of a dripping lipped the isolated houses,
A gaunt grey somber softness licked the glass of hours."
from Darkling Summer, Ominous Dusk, Rumorous Rain by Delmore Schwartz