Prayer In Bad Weather - Analysis

Sex as a way of being soothed

The poem’s central claim is blunt and oddly vulnerable: what the speaker misses is not just sex, but the small, attentive rituals around it—the way attention itself can make him feel held. He begins in a half-prayerful panic, By God, I don't know what to do, then immediately describes women as so nice to have around. The explicit scene—hands turning it, tweaking it, examining each part, hair falling on his belly—reads less like conquest than like being studied and cared for. The body becomes something another person takes time with, seriously.

The word extras and what it really means

When he says it’s not the fucking and sucking that softens a man, but the extras, he gives away the poem’s real subject: tenderness disguised as appetite. Extras means playfulness, patience, and a kind of ceremony—someone lingering, looking, making a moment. It’s a surprisingly precise psychology: the speaker is not melted by intensity alone, but by the feeling of being attended to without haste. That’s why the memory is both erotic and domestically gentle: hair on the belly, a serious look, hands that don’t rush.

Rain as the room’s other occupant

The poem turns hard on the line Now it's raining tonight. The women are suddenly elsewhere, in new bedrooms or maybe old ones, and the speaker is left with paperwork and noise: I've read the newspaper, paid the gas and electric and phone bills. The rain keeps insisting—one hell of a dashing, pouring rain—until it becomes a kind of weathered fate. The repetition of It keeps raining makes the loneliness feel ongoing, not dramatic, like something that simply continues after the door closes.

Softened, then abandoned in his own juice

A key tension is that the speaker blames women for what they awaken in him. They soften a man, he says, and then let him swim / in his own juice. The phrase is crude, but it’s also a sad metaphor for being left with nothing but your own wanting—desire turned inward until it becomes almost humiliating. He frames intimacy as a process that someone else begins and then refuses to finish, as if the women are responsible for the aftermath. Yet the poem also quietly admits the speaker’s dependence: he doesn’t just want sex; he wants the relief of being made gentle and then kept safe while gentle.

The fantasy of the old-fashioned whore

His imagined solution is revealing: not a lover returning, but an old-fashioned whore / at the door tonight, closing a green umbrella, with moonlit rain on her purse, complaining about his radio and telling him to turn up the heat. Even this bought intimacy is pictured as caretaking and domestic correction—someone improving the room, scolding the music, adjusting the temperature. The contradiction sharpens: he reaches for a transactional figure, yet he scripts her to behave like a companion who knows him well enough to criticize him. What he wants is closeness that feels ordinary, not glamorous; warmth, not novelty.

Rain that nourishes, rain that isolates

Near the end, the rain becomes almost moral in its indifference: it’s good for the trees, the grass, the air, good for things that / live alone. The speaker tries to accept this natural logic, but he can’t live inside it. The final plea—I would give anything / for a female's hand—is startlingly simple compared to the earlier explicitness, as if the poem has been stripping away excuses. In the last line, he returns to the governing wound: They soften a man, and then leave him listening to the rain. The weather ends up as the poem’s true companion: steady, cleansing, and utterly uninterested in whether he is loved.