“Chance of Precipitation”

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Poet Jessica Goodfellow was fighting her insomnia one night when she started thinking about the sound of water.

And how the sound of rain is different from the sound of a river and that’s different from the sound of an ocean.

And the next day she emailed all her friends to ask them what consonant and vowel sounds they associated with each of those kinds of water.

And the responses she got to that were very consistent. People always associated rain with sounds like t and k and pu. And the sound of a river was more liquid, like L’s and R’s. And an ocean sound was more like ooh.

And she wrote a poem based on that called Chance of Precipitation.

And I wanted to share it with you because there’s so much that’s delicious about this poem.

Part of it is the vocabulary because she uses words that I don’t use that often,

Like tessellated, meaning mosaic, or tarantella, meaning a rapid whirling dance from Italy,

Or literal, L-I-T-T-O-R-A-L, meaning having to do with the shore.

This is Chance of Precipitation by Jessica Goodfellow.

Rain’s tonal ticker tape, tarmac tarantella, rooftop timpani, water glitterati, articulate in triplicate.

River, all glissando, glossolalia, liquid limerick, wet tessellated, literal lateral lullaby.

Ocean’s hush-hush hoodoo, whispering womb,

Chez chartreuse chanteuse, fugue soothed in blue,

A wish awash in white noise.

The insomniac longs to transliterate,

Reign into a human alphabet, French maybe,

A lullaby, a chanson, a hymn,

A baptism of sleep as unstable as water.

That’s very beautiful.

Isn’t that great?

You can hear the different kinds of water, right?

Yeah, absolutely, 100%.

The rain and the river.

We’ll link to that poem on our website.

It’s called Chance of Precipitation by Jessica Goodfellow,

And it appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal.