Is Sobriety a Metaphor for Rain?

I’ve endured mostly quiet since the first day ofsobriety—until the rain came pelting ourwindows, rain we’ve been promised for days, this first ofspring rain, rain like hail on the rooftops rain forcingus from our houses in bathrobes & bare feet toinspect the damage done; rain that washes our cars,we’re relieved, raking away wind-swept leaves, petalson windshields torn like broken hearts we scribble onconstruction paper to overcome our depressions,so much storm-cloud black rain, tablets of rain like abad book rain we keep reading to see just how badit gets; pages of rain turning so our eyes tracethe sky westward, where it shifts its corrosive huesnorthward, & there’s more rain, & trees twisting as ifhallelujah it’s raining finally rain, wherethe heat shrugs off like a boy embarrassed becausehe’s just peed his pants from crossing his legs holdingtoo long, like a cumulus bulging with rain thatempties like a bucket that keeps refilling fromthe same well, so much rain like piss on that boy’s pantlike a patch of dirt just splattered with rain, soakingso you see how dirt deepens to dark mud from asimple splash of rain, but oh how quiet the boy’sshame, how his eyes become tempered by grief, his lippouting, tears verging, mucus swelling the sinuscavity like rain filling the eaves, rinsing outthe muck, it might be cleansed but probably its stainsremain, like a liver shriveled from incessantalcohol returns somewhat to its former shape,a liver percolating booze like rain tricklingits last drops through sewer lids in the street, rain wewon’t ever pray away, rain we hold our breaths foruntil we’re grey as rain banishing the silencebefore this poem came, this welcome to spring rain.____Darius Stewart was born in 1979 and grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee. He attended Tennessee State University and The University of Tennessee, where he earned a B.A. with honors in English. He is a former fellow of the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets and the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas—Austin, where he graduated with an M.F.A. in poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Potomac Review, Walking Is Still Honest, Appalachian Heritage, Callaloo, The Seattle Review, Meridian, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, and two volumes of The Southern Poetry Anthology, among various other journals and anthologies. He is the author of two chapbooks published in the Main Street Rag Poetry Chapbook Series: The Terribly Beautiful (2006) and Sotto Voce (2008), and his third chapbook, The Ghost the Night Becomes (2014), won the Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Prize. He is the Reviews Editor/Poetry Reviewer for Grist: The Journal for Writers, and resides in his hometown, Knoxville, with his dog, Philip J. “Fry”.