Rain Street is probably 80% Main Street, Roscommon and I'm a child waiting in the car while my mother is 'getting the messages'; 20% some Dublin street back in the 60's.
I've tried to catch the scene a number of times in different poems, but have never succeeded. There are differences between then and now, mainly in the lighting. Back then a fairly basic pub might have a bare 100 watt bulb lighting the bar, it gave a tea-coloured glow through the rain, a single customer might be hunched over a pint of Guinness. A barber's might have a neon strip light; through the window you would see the barber clipping away in hard enamel white.
And, of course, most parking was on the street, a street of small shops, so a number of shopkeepers could be watched going through their paces: the butcher in bloodied white, grocer in his brown coat, the be-suited, hush-puppied draper.
For a while the rippling reflections of neon signs and street lights would engage a 10 year old, people flashed from doorway to doorway, collars up like Hollywood gangsters; as a local, I knew the cast, I knew the conversations, rain threw them into an altogether new focus. Later, however, the fogged up windows reduced the view to a peep hole in the condensation, and boredom was never far behind that.
Rain Street
Down the street
rain lights running
drizzling concrete
sizzling lake.
Flashes red flashes
running in rivulets
yachting cartons
crowd in a grate.
Umbrella shadows
with foot halo splashes
shirt collar drippings
shoes under siege.
Gutters play bongos
for galvanize tappers
tyres make clashes
spangling streams.
And faces in windows
unravel down panes
their cigarettes burning
their signature stains.
Then squinting bus queue
like socks on a line
become runaway legs
legs like twine
