The loving puddle in the gutter off market street-- the one that fills with dirt and **** and damp newspaper, plastic soda cup, strange indecipherable Chinese pamphlets with bleeding characters. She smiles at the sun and renders its visions on her face, and with great tension attempts to demonstrate her willingness, her blushing consent to being totally subsumed by its whims. Of course she trembles at the diurnal stampede of feet, but is not afraid-- for she too speaks in eternity. She has evaporated before-- she has kissed the incessant sky over Marrakesh in the soft morning and dreams of the sparkling mountainsides in the night, when she is divided by callous rubber tires or cast below by competing distant rains. Yet she has always found her way back home; Nestled in the subtle indentation of road besides the brickway near Battery.

"Dewdrop, let me cleanse
in your brief
sweet waters . . .
These dark hands of life"

It was one of the waning days of winter, in the blurred haze of rains, when we left the coast and began our journey home. As she drove, I watched the pebbled streaks roll across the window into great vertical streams, to be cast off indistinct along the stationary road. Upon all our sides, Even the black-toothed mountain tops lost their grandiose summits into the fog. Off the road, next to the sagging remains of a gas station, a man sat beneath the naked fist of an old willow tree. He, with a teal umbrella, twirled the nylon circle so that the collecting sheen of water spun and spiraled centrifugal out into the bombarding camaraderie of fellow drops. The damp fields sat empty of life behind him, casting into evanescent black oceans of dirt. As we hurried past, I turned back-- and following him with my own watering eyes, I watched for as long as I could--until he too faded silently into the mist.