Drops Like Rain

In the rain
what will be remembered of your face
does not blur so easily

and I see so clearly

the wonderful, seasonal, leaf-brown shading of your eyes
piercing thru the large pane of shop glass
as you jump the space between awnings trying not to get wet

I see you remembering to smile then scrunching your face when
an already couple bumps into you and
just like that
you slide back into the weather and your hair drinks what drips
from the beast that has become this night’s sky

From this booth I cannot save you
not even in my manliest imagination
not even in the best years of my faster boyhood
not even not hardly no way

so,
when you do not fall into the drink
but instead bend at the knees and waist
and waggle your hips into a brake

the sound that comes from me does not match my facade

Every day
since first looking into the falling stream that was your face
watching helplessly you
slipping and grinding and stopping yourself in the rain

the way you held on stood pat hung in there
never minding the fools behind with their outstretched, dry hands and apologies
instead, shaking it off and finding me in that deliberate, slow turn
of your drenched face dry inside at a booth then winking

it is hard to image how I will stop myself from falling for you
like fat drops of April rain

my fingers
down thru your head’s drenched curls
across the wet waving line of your brow
racing in swirls over the bridge of your nose
rimming silver slivers ’round your flared nostrils
before landing and lacing and beading into the grace on your full lips

I am already learning to love the way that you hold your mouth
already slipping
already being pushed by wanting what these other couples have
are willing to race thru full streets
clearing pathways and already full spaces beneath awnings
where some other not-yet-loved fool
is trying not
to get this wonderfully wet

Jas. Mardis 4/2015
(14ioiws)

Jas. Mardis is a 2014 Inductee to The Texas Literary Hall of Fame, a Pushcart Prize Winner for Poetry and Editor of KenteCloth: Southwest Voices of the African Diaspora (UNT Press).