The legacies of traumatic events are often still present in the locations of those events, even when many years have passed since the original trauma. The poems in Water From the Rain-Gauge operate in a mnemonic and contemporary space which confronts these legacies. Written in the present, in full view of the past, they seek to reconstitute a child's memories of such events and, with an adult's empathy and compassion, reconstruct and reckon with the emotionally- and politically-charged memories inevitably accumulated during maturation. They thus focus on such occasions as the legacy of the Wilmington insurrection of 1898; a local case of arson, the arsonist's flight, and his death by police action; a lifelong agnosticism and its contrast with the obvious beauty and power of religious iconography; the simple beauty of family and garden surrounding a childhood home.