H A R D

It’s the angles that strike him.

___________________

Blades and shingles and carefully-fitted ragged-edged shards.

Soft, he thinks. What is soft anymore.

I watch him. I am reading, my novel his string of unpressed thoughts.

He watches lines. He watches the sky

gray as ever, no soft color. Hard. Shifting uncomfortably above him

while he stands still on the cement corner.

Please hide now, I murmur, hoping he can’t hear me

but honors my plea. It’s coming.

His hand twitches, simultaneous left of elbow and wrist and something is there

at the base of his thumb.

Soft, he thinks. No, wet, I think. It’s here. I call I hear it’s supposed to storm.

Bad? Yeah, that’s what they say.

I haven’t seen rain in a long time. There’s room over here. And I point

to a bench near mine under the shelter,

the one the city put up at the edge of Brook Park, where never have I ever seen

more neglected potential, unused guts.

He is a sullen puppy being led to a kennel, lumbering, tentative

and he sits down, still

strapped in zipped up. I wonder if I could make it to class before downfall,

it starts. The sky is sick of mercy. Smirk.

Guess not, huh. Huh is a blunt hook for my poetic ears. It hangs in the air

not unlike a question but more

like the audible last exhalation of a chipped-at will. His head is still on sideways

and it is in noticing this that I notice

I have been staring at his earlobe for the past ten seconds. It’s unattached, free-hanging.

So if my face were buried in his neck

and my nose lined up against the divide of brown hair and fair bare

then I could hold it all in my rose-petal lips.

Show him soft. Self-edit. No. That’s not okay. Think nobly.

He is just a strange stranger. I move to

his wide hands, the palms intimate against his corduroyed kneecaps

gripping and pulling them closer.

He is tense. So how are you? I ask lamely. He turns to me, socially proper.

He hadn’t really seen me until now.

Those widening pupils were unhidden clues. I’m good, how about you?

Oh I’m terrible. Yeah me too.

A forty-percent smile with unparted lips. Now he is looking at them.

Lots of finals I imagine? Yes, he says.

Everything has been hard lately. Everything. And I’m missing chem right now,

Not helpful. His voice snakes around my middle,

deep, squeezing through spaces between my ribs. But you can’t stop the weather I guess.

Answering quickly, Nope.

So what about you? Me? I asked. I mean I like rain but if I could stop THIS rain I would.

It’s…. He laughs like silver. It burns and then heals.

I meant about exams. Oh. Well, you know… not too bad. There are worse things.

Small talk is for people that are not me.

Evidence of this truth: now he puts his hands minus his thumbs in the front pockets of

his spring jacket and puts his dark eyes on a tree

seventy feet away. Shame on those of us who proudly cannot function in the knee-deep.

I would kill for that skill right now.

Instead there is a verbal silence and an atmospheric roaring,

a shared viewing of sheets of water

as they wave hello, goodbye mid-air, puppets of the manipulative wind.

We are seeing the same things.

But now I sense him rummaging, he is on the brink of self-doubt. So why would you

stop the rain?

It’s falling too hard. It’s too hard a thing. That’s it? Yes. Does it scare you? No.

Did it hurt you? No.

Did you go out into it? No.

Did it stop you from going somewhere? No.

Were you going to sit here all day? I know but cannot say, and that is not an answer.

I feel unwarranted shame.

Look! he murmurs, his forehead bobs in the direction of five students in a circle

jumping in puddles, laughing.

One girl had her mouth agape to the endless charcoal above, her dreamcatcher. Look,

they’re having a blast in the downpour, he jokes gently.

T-shirts and hair soaked. I worry for them. Yeah, that looks so fun, my words

savoring of sarcasm, eliciting a reaction of

Let’s do it. Just be spontaneous. School’s almost out. C’mon. Coils in my body tighten,

he is pulling at my heartstrings.

I don’t think we should. The forecast… Was bad? I know, but look now! It’s beautiful.

No I mean….

And then the sound. Plink plink plink. Plunk plunk bam. Bam bam bam bam bam bam.

The girls at play are yelping now,

not in jest, but in pain. Being pelted by the baseball-sized solidified crystallized.

He looks down,

then back at me.

He knows I knew, and it hits him.

Teach me something soft, he says. Please.