"Stranger things than true love have happened in America." It is an odd way to praise love, by ranking it below a shower of toads. The opening sentence works like a bet. If you doubt that true love is possible, the speaker will show you that the world is stranger than your doubt allows. The rest of the poem is that evidence, and it never returns to the subject of love.
The voice is the first thing to notice. It sounds like an almanac or a clipped newspaper column, flat and factual. Towns "experienced a downpour" or "witnessed a rainfall," as if they were clerks filing a report. The pattern is the same every time: creature, place, year. "Frogs bombarded Kansas City in 1873 and Dubuque in 1882." A reader may or may not stop to check each entry, but the form does the persuading. Place names and dates carry the authority of record, and the deadpan keeps the speaker from sounding like a dreamer. The dates also refuse to line up. The poem jumps from 1873 to 1882 to 1901 to 1870, then on to 2007 and back to 1828. There is no tidy story of progress here, only strangeness scattered across nearly two centuries and still turning up in 2011.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are close to equal in length, so the poem looks like a block of print, and the sentences cut across the line endings. "Memphis / witnessed" and "Sacramento experienced / a downpour" both split a subject from its verb. Lines 1 and 3 end on the small word "in," which hangs in the air before the next line delivers its landing. The reader tumbles down the page much as the frogs and fish tumble down the sky. Because the sentences are short and declarative, and because they keep repeating the same shape, the ordinary tone makes the content seem stranger.
The list is also carefully arranged. It starts with amphibians, moves through snakes, worms and fish, then turns at "Certain fruits have also / fallen from the heavens." The sky stops dropping creatures and starts dropping food. The verbs shift with it, from "bombarded" and "blanketed" to "drizzled" and "showered," and finally "sprinkled." The weather begins like artillery and ends like something done in a kitchen. The phrase "flightless animals" is a small surprise, since it names the creatures by what they cannot do. Nothing in this sky belongs there, which makes the falling stranger. "Branchless heights" is stranger still: peaches, and "unripe" ones, drop from an orchard with no trees. The repeated "fallen" and "heavens" may also let a familiar idiom hum underneath, because we say people fall in love. That is an inference, since the poem never says it, but the words are certainly placed where the idiom can be heard.
The ending reuses the opening's key word: "Stranger still, cotton candy clouds sprinkled Lake County with sugar crystals twice in 1857." The record-keeping voice finally slips into fantasy, yet it keeps its bureaucratic precision in the exact "twice." The final image is sweetness, after all the toads and snakes. Love is not named, but the poem comes to rest on the sugary end of the improbable.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It argues for love without sentiment, by accumulating evidence and trusting the specifics to do the work. It also leaves room for two readings. One is comforting: if the sky can rain fish, true love is not so unlikely. The other is humbler. The title, "Strange Weather," suggests love may be less like something we choose and more like weather, something that falls on us from above, sometimes slimy and sometimes sweet, in a year and a place we did not pick. The poem never says which reading is right, and the silence about love leaves the reader to make the connection.