Amy Lowell Prize, selected by Sarah Audsley
J. Kates, a minor poet and a literary translator, has published two books and three chapbooks of his own poems, and more than a dozen translations of Russian and French poetry. He has edited two anthologies of Russian translations and is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.
THE RAINMAKER She rode into town on the back of an old wagon. The dust had settled on her like a shadow. Her green eyes reflected the memory of ice and roots. The whole town came to look into her eyes. An old woman said, "She is a rainmaker," and we felt the thirst in dusty throats that had lived through summer as if it were winter and winter as if there'd be a spring. Men came down from their brown hills, women from their dry kitchens. When all of us, even the smallest child, had seen leaves and rivers in her eyes, she walked out at noon into the sunlight and turned her face to the sky. For twenty-four hours she let the sky, the hard bright eyes of the empty night and the single lidless flare of the sun, look into the leaflets and rivulets under her lashes. Then she left town on the back of an old wagon, blindness burned into her eyes like the dust. From time to time we remember her green eyes, the men in their brown hills, the women in their dry kitchens. And, when we do, we drop the few, bitter tears of the drought-ridden who can pour out only what they have. And from time to time by day or night clouds gather like dust over our heads. Then, for a few hours or only a minute or two it rains delicately and lays the dust like shadows in the wagon ruts that mark strangers' passage in and out of town.