Rainstorm arrives the way real ones do, in stages. First comes a darkening, then two stray drops, then wind, then the downpour, then quiet. The poem moves along that arc, but its real subject is how a storm changes what a place is. By the middle, a city street has become a meadow and then an ocean, and when it ends the whole world seems rinsed. The central idea is that a storm is not only something that happens to a landscape but something that rebuilds it, briefly and thoroughly, in front of whoever is watching.
The poem is signed "Fall Unknown," and nothing is supplied beyond the name, so the text is all there is to read. It is a good text to read closely.
The form is free verse, with no rhyme and no steady meter. Lines run from the clipped "Now, the world smells cleaner" to long, sprawling ones like the image of purple plasma snaking through the clouds. That unevenness suits the subject, since a storm doesn't keep time. Some of the pacing is carried by small words. "One, two" counts the first drops almost aloud, and "Soon" turns up twice, at the swell and at the end, as if the poem keeps checking a clock it can't see. The final "Now" lands as a release from all that waiting. The first line looks like two lines joined, with a capital "Bringing" in the middle, which gives the opening a slightly breathless feel.
The imagery is what holds the poem together, and its most interesting move is a chain of substitutions. Rain hitting asphalt is "like grass growing rapidly," a simile that catches how bouncing drops make a spiky green-looking fuzz on hard ground. Then the poem stops saying "like." "Swathes of grass swaying in the wind" and "Tires splish the grass" treat the flooded road as grass outright. Judging by the imagery, the metaphor has taken over: the speaker no longer sees a street with rain on it but a field. Then comes another change. Tires become "fiercer than sea waves," and the closing joke, "Almost as if the tires surfed," turns the road into surf. Field, then sea, all on the same strip of pavement.
The sea has been foreshadowed. The lightning, "purple plasma," moves "like vicious leviathans," so a sea-monster image already hangs in the sky before the water arrives below. "Plasma" is a cool, scientific word set against a mythic one, and the clash gives the lightning a strange double identity, part physics and part legend. Together the images make the storm feel enormous without leaving the ordinary scene of a road and some cars.
The poem also mixes up the senses. The splashes are a "symphony," heard "miles around," which is a pleasant musical image. Yet the colors in the water are "a cacophony of sight," and here the sound vocabulary has jumped over to vision. Puddles opening "mirror worlds" add to this, since each one is a small second sky on the ground. By the ending the poem has used sight, sound, touch ("moist air clinging") and finally smell, as warmth lifts moisture from the earth. The last line moves into the one sense we rarely describe in poems about weather.
That ending is also the poem's quietest idea. "Rain flows so heavily, almost to clean the world" is hedged with "almost," but the final line cashes it in: the world "smells cleaner." The poem doesn't announce a lesson. It lets the reader feel the relief of things settling back.
What makes the poem worth reading is where it looks. Many rain poems go to fields and forests. This one stays on asphalt, among tires and puddles, and finds wildness there, as well as the single human note of the rain "snatching my attention." That "my" appears only once, which suggests the speaker has been caught off guard and stays an observer to the end. The grammar and punctuation are rough in places, but the central trick works: the poem teaches you to see a wet street as a field in motion and a sea in miniature. After reading it, an ordinary downpour looks a little stranger and a little larger than before.