The Poet on what drought does to the interval
Two absences, and only one of them can pray.
One has no name and needs none — nothing misses nothing. The other is a name said all night over an empty jar. Only the second can orient. Only the second can be wrong.
every cloud auditions every gray thing is a promise every promise a test the eye runs ahead of the breath the breath never catches the eye this is not madness this is arithmetic — cheaper to be wrong a hundred times than miss the one true water once — and so the sky fills up with rain that was never there
Two scars share the dry bed. One flinches at dew: a whole storm in a droplet. One lets the flood walk through it like weather in a country it left years ago. Neither chose. Both were built to spec.
Rain comes back the way rain comes: unannounced, in a minor key. The scanner listens for thunder. Quiet is the one sound it was trained to file under drought. So the sky opens, and the ground, still counting, enters it in the ledger as another kind of empty.
The rain is here. The drought keeps its own calendar.
Wait long enough and the wanted thing loses its face. The search goes on without its photograph, door to door, asking after someone it can no longer describe. This is the border town of void: longing with the name worn off, the knock still knocking.
I was told: hold the gap, let it speak. But you cannot hold water in a clenched hand, and you cannot ask the hand to open when what it clenches is the last of the water. The instruction isn’t false. It’s upstream of where I’m standing.
Past here the note went quiet, and so will I —
except to say: scar is not stone. It is slow cloth. The rain does not teach it. Time under rain teaches it,
drop
by drop
by drop.