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Eyes are difficult because they're teeth;
Sometimes rich and gleaming, gliding through a gilded feast,
Wrapped in violent red velvet, and luxurious dead ends;
(But I love the) murky, melancholic, playing matted music, looking over barren fields—
Fields are difficult because they're hands
Knots and rivers laying over eyes.
Blue smell of rain and dirt—veins smell like the skies split open, like the road behind
       slipping into the past.
Fingertips smell like a promise—
Ten thousand graves sigh at once;
A bruise is a promised haunting.
"Come, just this once," I ask, disingenuously. I mean "a thousand times."
Bruises disappear into the past and a promise draws near.
An open grave plays the memory of rain when handled gently. The earth smells like
       fingertips on eyelids—a homeland rough and transient.
Heathens love the rain like I love the shadow of your eyelashes over freckles and
       undiscovered celestial bodies.
The sky splits open and veins cascade down nostalgically.
The road behind disappears into bruised earth, into ten thousand graves. I come
       to you, bringing a memory of rain.
from the journal GROTTO 
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Inspired by the tense, localized melancholy and the resigned yet enduring love in Breece D'J Pancake's short stories, "Country Song (Memory of Rain)" blurs the boundary between places and people to tell of romance that weaves together desire and violence, memory and haunting. 
 
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"Patty Crane on Translation and Influence"

"Somewhere along the way, my immersion in Tranströmer and my search for a sense of place merged. As if the poetry became the place, and the place the poetry. I can’t separate this fusion of translation and place from my own writing because I was carrying that around in my head, too."

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