I am holding the hope of Gil Scott-Heron’s “be no rain” in “I Think I’ll Call it Morning”. I am holding fast to the second “be no rain,” as the first is an assertion, but the second is an insistence. My fingers are slipping, but I’m holding.
The lake waves lick fiercely and the foamy gray thrashes over clusters of rocks. The third and fourth “be no rain” are not assertions or insistences, but manifestations, commands. A warding off. A verbal staying of the deluge.
I’m sorry, but I can’t answer the phone. Whatever I agreed to, I have to cancel. I’m back to clenching my jaw, back to shallow breath and catches in my heartbeat—so I listen on a loop and try to breathe through into my heels and feel their contact with the floor. I think that’s what they told me to do.
I’m not sorry. Feel most alert when making soup, most in love when I am watching him speak and suddenly the absinthe-eyes make contact with mine mid-sentence. Most useful when the baby reaches out her hand for mine on the way out of the church without speaking, as if the most natural form of being in space with me is bridging it. Even as we approach the touch-and-go season, and I can feel myself wishing I was someone in the television, or someone who could swim, I feel a little bolstered even as the plates shift under my planted feet. Be no rain. Hang tight. There is tenderness yet.