One of the novel’s most memorable sequences to this effect takes the form of a 6,000-word lyric essay on a short poem by George Oppen. The narrator, after watching a sparrow outside his window, asks L to bring him a book of Oppen’s so that he can remember a particular poem the sight of the bird stirred in him. The poem, “Stranger’s Child,” is one he first encountered in graduate school, and he has long struggled to communicate what exactly about it he finds so captivating. For the narrator, Oppen’s works are “gnomic, almost impenetrable sometimes, abstract,” irreducible to any singular interpretation, which is precisely what allows them to be inexhaustible, “occasions for wonder” (177).

Though he has read and taught this poem for years (and once attempted to write a dissertation on it), through his contemplation in the ICU he comes to see it in a new light. In his sickbed, he holds the book on his lap for long stretches of time, gazing at the words and letting his attention rest on the shapes they make on the page. Alone in the hospital room, he reads this poem with what feels like his whole being, attending to the way each word becomes “consecrated” by the personal and poetic histories it calls forth (182). While he has always appreciated how Oppen’s writing can feel like a “record of a mind’s noticing, a moment of particularizing attention,” his experience as a patient lends him a deeper understanding of the stakes of such attention—and what makes it meaningful (179). Now on the other side of the “great gulf” that divides the sick from the (temporarily) well, his heightened isolation makes him more acutely aware of relationality at work in the poem—how Oppen’s choice to describe the sparrow as “sparrow’s child” renders it “more individual because related to another” (182). Reading this phrase in the context of his hospitalization, he comes to see “why all the particularizing attention of the doctors and nurses, all the precise data they had collected from my specific body, had nothing to do with me, really, left the crucial me unseen, untouched” and why the limited time he gets to spend with L during visiting hours, by contrast, restores to him a sense of personhood he has otherwise lost (183).

While in some ways illness constrains the narrator’s attention—he notes that, due to the pain and the medications, he still can’t read, that staring at the words is all he can manage—that very limitation opens up his capacity to see the poem anew. “Probably I wouldn’t have seen Oppen’s poem in this way anywhere other than that bed, staring at the poem as I might stare at a painting,” he notes, “which if you do long enough you make discoveries, the painting opens up, you tune yourself to its frequency” (189). Tuning to the poem’s frequency, he arrives at further insights around poetry’s power to activate our attention, the precarity of our ability to care for another, and the surprising comfort and solace the poem’s ending evokes for him.

This comfort is soon put to the test. At the end of the section, the narrator undergoes a PET scan that quickly proves excruciating. Forced to stay still for an hour, he finds that the tube becomes “intolerable . . . like a straitjacket or a grave,” and he is overcome by a desire to scream (225). Refusing to let himself succumb to this urge, he attempts to settle himself by reciting poems he has memorized over the years. Yet the lines disintegrate in his mind as soon as they form; none of them amount to more than a phrase (like “skittering spined things slipping through my fingers,” he despairs, “they were of no use at all” [226]). He continues to try to placate his nerves, imagining his home, his studio, his bedroom, even his partner’s face, but nothing helps—“anywhere I tried to grasp myself I fled myself, there were no images or poems” (227).

But that isn’t exactly right—as soon as he’s given up attempts to conjure lines or images, he realizes he has been repeating something all along, subconsciously turning over the final two words of Oppen’s poem again and again like a chant or a prayer. The words become a refuge, “the smallest patch of stable ground” for his mind to rest upon, and he continues chanting—“naked rock, naked rock, naked rock”—until he finds that he is emerging from the scanner; remarkably, he has made it through (227).

There is no grand transformation. He’s still there in the PET scan. Yet in that moment, Oppen’s poem provides him with companionship that ultimately proves salvific: he can endure what previously felt unbearable, and in the process he feels less alone. It is one of the novel’s moments of everyday grace, moments where the narrator’s devotion to poetry does, in fact, save him. And one of the most striking aspects of this particular moment is that it is unwilled—it comes not through the narrator’s futile attempts to grasp at words and phrases but seemingly of its own accord, at a level beneath conscious thought. Perhaps this illustrates how we can’t anticipate what will become meaningful to us; salvific, even. As Greenwell writes in an essay in Harper’s Magazine, we can’t engineer transformational encounters with art or force a given poem or piece of art to be of use.³ Yet close reading makes that possibility available, and sometimes that’s enough.

The training in attentiveness that poetry provides, combined with the utter disorientation of sudden illness, also startles the narrator into seeing his own body anew. As he cleans himself with antibacterial wipes on his final morning in the hospital, he remembers the care with which his nurse Alivia washed him when he was unable to wash himself—and the reflections this act of intimacy prompted. In what feels like a close reading of his own body, he examines the memories, embarrassments, shames, and pleasures stored in his flesh, taking stock of all that his body holds that he typically shies away from or has simply become immune to noticing. As she cleans the back of his knee, he recalls the surreptitious touch of a man in a bar in Avignon 15 years earlier, a memory “compressed the way memories compress when they lodge in the body, in taste or smell, in touch, when they leapfrog language and therefore time” (245).

Though he typically averts his eyes from his bare body, he decides to look at himself now—at the bruises on his abdomen left by daily heparin shots, at the stretch marks and rolls of fat he has had since adolescence, at all the parts of himself he has long considered causes for humiliation.⁴ “Poor body,” he thinks to himself, recalling all the ways it has been a site of shame and derision. Looking at himself in this way, he arrives at another small moment of revelation: he comes to see how strange a thing a body is—“how eerie to be filled with blood and covered with hair, to be a machine any part of which might fail”—and, moreover, how strange

to have hated it so much, when it had always been so serviceable, when it had done more or less everything I had needed until now, when for more than forty years it had worked so well. Poor body, I thought again, looking down on it. I had hated it so much and been so ashamed and I might have loved it instead, I thought suddenly, it had been all that time available for love and it had never occurred to me to love it, it would have seemed impossible, as it seemed impossible now. (249)

As with his time in the PET scan, there is no earth-shattering epiphany; he does not instantly come to love this body that has always been a source of shame. Yet through close attention, he comes to view his body as at least available for love, and he arrives at glimpses of an alternative way of relating to himself and the aspects of his body he has taken for granted. In other words, he sees his body, if not with love, then at least with renewed attention—attention to the possibility of love. And while loving his body still seems impossible, this, too, is not a stable truth: as he reflects on how much he has hated his body, he comes to appreciate the subtle ways in which L has been teaching him different modes of relating to it. “Maybe he had sensed what I felt and wanted to teach me a different feeling,” the narrator ventures. “Maybe I could still get over myself, I thought, maybe L would teach me yet” (249). Through reading his body as he would a poem, he comes to view it as available to love, and through the continual affection of his partner, this love feels at least less impossible to reach.

And perhaps this is the thrumming heart of the novel: that illness ultimately orients the narrator toward the small profundity of daily acts of intimacy and care. Through domesticity’s “constant minor frictions, its impediments to freedom” he has become dulled and deadened to his life with L; he has come to take their love for granted, chafing at its constrictions. At times he worries that he is not cut out for a long-term partnership, that he has “little talent for it,” and periodically he yearns for the freedom and adventure—“the pleasures of singleness”—that were once the defining features of his life (89, 161). Yet through the isolation of illness, and the slow contemplation that being in a hospital bed forces upon him, he comes to yearn for the everyday intimacies he sometimes scorned or simply ceased to notice. When L first comes to visit him in the ICU, the narrator greets him with their usual names for each other—“mi amor, mi vida”—but feels them differently, “fully, in a way [he] hadn’t in some time” (89). And when he is finally released from the hospital, free to return home, he sees more fully how domesticity can be just as filled with mystery as the life of erotic adventure he has given up. Just as he finds infinity in a 34-word poem, he comes to see that L, too, is inexhaustible and that committing to a life together is its own form of adventure.

This dynamic mirrors the book’s epigraph, taken from Elizabeth Bowen’s novel The Heat of the Day: “To have turned away from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything.”⁵ The narrator’s sudden sickness forces him to turn away from the world he has known and to look again at the love he has taken for granted. Paradoxically, having his world wrested from him in an instant slowly returns it to him. In this way, he sees the freedom that is possible only through constraint and the affirmation of life that follows his close encounter with death.

For all these moments of revelation, Small Rain resists clean resolutions and easy answers. The narrator never learns the reason for his sudden illness; he is told he must follow up for monthly scans to monitor the need for surgery, which is still not entirely off the table, and he will have to take medication for the rest of his life. Because his case is in many ways anomalous, his doctors have no clear sense of his prognosis, and many of his questions about what his future will look like remain unanswered. And while he emerges from his hospitalization determined to commit more fully to his life, there is no guarantee that he will be permanently altered by these experiences; in fact, each realization carries within it a note of its own contingency and tenuousness.

Yet these small epiphanies, however long they last, alert him to the utter extraordinariness of ordinary happiness. When he finally leaves the hospital, after an initial “grunt of animal happiness,” the narrator pauses to take in the moment fully:

Try to remember this, I admonished myself, since I knew it would fade. All happiness fades, or does for me; misery digs deep gouges in memory, sets the course of the self, I sometimes think, it lays down the tracks one is condemned to move along, whereas happiness leaves no trace. Remember this, I said to myself. Why should only suffering be a vale of soul-making, why shouldn’t the soul be made of this moment, too, this unremarkable moment, remember this. (276)

Small Rain is an ode to such unremarkable moments—to the small revelations that close attention makes possible, and to the everyday wonders and acts of intimacy that often go unnoticed. Through its devotion to the particular, the novel offers glimpses of art’s capacity to accompany us through life’s limit experiences—and perhaps to deepen and transform our capacity for care along the way.

Sarah Fleming, MDiv ’21, is a palliative care chaplain based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and serves as an editor at Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.