Three short lines, three small observations, and not one dramatic verb. Rain doesn't pour, drum or fall here. In "The Way Rain Is~~", Bliss simply points to what rain is like to be near: its smell, its look, its feel. The central idea is that the pleasure of rain lives in ordinary sensory detail, so familiar that the poem doesn't need to explain it. The reader supplies the rest from memory.
The form is the traditional hailine count of five, seven and five syllables. "Rain's smell in summer" has five, "How it looks on the pavement" has seven, and "How it feels on skin" has five. There is no rhyme, and none is missed. The poem relies on repetition instead. "How it" opens both the second and third lines, giving the poem a quiet, counting-off rhythm, like someone listing favourite things. The first line works differently. It begins with the bare noun phrase "Rain's smell", naming the subject before the next two lines describe how it behaves.
The order of the senses matters. Smell comes first, and it needs no contact at all, because it simply arrives in the air. Sight comes second, and it is fixed to a place: "on the pavement", a little way off but still in view. Touch comes last, and it is the closest of all: "on skin". Read in sequence, the poem moves inward, from air to street to body, as if the rain were gradually closing the distance between the world and the speaker. The repeated "on" does a lot of the work here. Rain lands on things, and each landing is nearer than the one before.
The choice of "pavement" is worth pausing over. It is a hard, plain, city word, not a meadow or a forest, and the poem finds its beauty on a surface most people walk across without a thought. Bliss doesn't describe what the wet pavement looks like. The word "looks" invites us to picture it ourselves, perhaps darkened or shining. That restraint runs through the whole poem. There isn't a single evaluative adjective, no "lovely" or "fresh" or "wonderful". The happiness is never announced. It shows in the fact that someone has paid such careful attention.
"Summer" is the poem's only season, and it quietly shapes everything after it. Judging by that word, this is warm rain, the kind that makes "on skin" feel welcome and not like something to hurry indoors from. The smell, too, is tied to a time of year, which suggests memory as much as observation.
Two absences are striking. Sound, the first thing most poems about rain reach for, is missing entirely, as are taste and any sense of the rain's force. Whether or not this was deliberate, it leaves the poem hushed and gentle, closer to a private moment than a storm.
The ending is the most expressive choice. Haiku often close on a sharp, clean cut, but this one trails off in an ellipsis: "How it feels on skin…". The sentence never finishes its thought. Touch is the most intimate sense in the sequence, and it is the one where description gives out. The dots suggest the speaker lingering in the sensation instead of explaining it. The title does something similar. The tildes after "Is" look like ripples, a small visual echo of water, and "The Way Rain Is" promises a definition. What follows is a definition built from experiences, not from facts.
I don't have reliable information about the poet or when the poem was written, so it makes sense to stay with what the page offers. Its significance lies in how little it takes to make a reader feel something. With three lines and no ornament, it shows that attention can be a kind of happiness, and the name attached to it, Bliss, happens to fit. It also depends on the reader. Everyone's rain smells slightly different, and the poem only comes fully alive when you recall your own.