When it rained in Vegas

Jacob Akey

Author’s note: A good poem, like a good joke, ought not have commentary; it needs be complete and, therefore, self-contained. Perhaps then, I indict myself, a bad poet. But here the commentary is anyways. I thought the little couplet would look naked, standing by itself on the barren field of a page. Ever since Eve bit that citron, I find public nakedness unbearable. A pea on a plate, or a New Jersey governor on a beach, loneliness just looks wrong. Unsettling. Or perhaps I think that art is nothing without conversation. How can I trust you, who I have never met, to have the right conversation with my poem? No. I must do it myself. Taking things from the top, the title is quite literal. I suppose I could have used the infinitive tense (rains), but it is much too late to fix it now. Maybe, the title is too far along in the poem. You must have context. I was in Las Vegas (Nevada), and it rained. It struck me how the gamblers would not notice the precipitation; the city`s parched sidewalks would destroy any evidence. The casinos have no windows. The outside world threatens their grip. This is a rather unique situation in the course of human existence, being alive yet unaware of rain. Until quite recently, we lived agrarian lives; tracking rainfall was necessary for eating. Before that, we would have felt the drops through the roof of our tents and worried about canceled hunts. Even earlier, flood. One must imagine that rainfall was infinitely more salient to the Paiutes, who moved to the deserts of Las Vegas long before Steve Wynn ever did. They would have noticed. So too, would have the Latter-day Saints who built a fort in the area; I imagine they are quite happy their stint with American Sodom ended before the pillars of salt that will start appearing any day now. It is unnatural to live without awareness of nature; it is obscene to do so in the desert. Now that you have context, we shall dive back into my couplet. “Little men” refers to gamblers, dwarfed in size by the gratuitous casinos, hundred-ounce daiquiris, and thousand-person buffets. The “great big rooms” are the casinos, of course. The men in the rooms “will never see the desert bloom” both in the literal sense that they do not see the rain, nor will they notice the renewal it triggers, but also at an allegorical level. They are trapped indoors by their own greed and that of the Delaware-registered LLCs that feed their infirmities: sex, alcohol, and a blind eye toward worse. They will not see the brown-eyed primroses, fiddlenecks, or little gold poppies because of their own vice-driven blindness. The poem, all seventeen words of it (including the title), is an expression of grief. I grieve over the husbands, stolen from their wives, the fathers stolen from their children, and from the nature stolen from little men. Nevada Goddam.