You held it wrong all afternoon, the wind turning its ribs inside out on Fenwick Street until the whole thing bloomed backward like a startled black flower, and you laughed, alone, at the bus stop, a small embarrassed laugh nobody caught. I caught it. I keep everything nobody catches.
So here is what I will do with it. The umbrella will not close tonight. It will open in your kitchen, wider than the ceiling, and the rain will already be falling inside, warm, the good kind, the kind you stood in once as a child before you learned to run from it.
The spokes will become the ribs of a boat. You will be rowing. Somewhere your mother will be calling you in for dinner, though she has been gone some years now, and you will not find this strange, because I do not deal in the difference between what is and what you wanted.
The wind will come back, of course. But tonight when it flips the umbrella inside out you will simply keep walking, dry, holding a bowl of stars over your head like it was always the plan. The bus you missed will arrive as a slow whale. You will board it. Everyone will be someone you meant to call.
I noticed you were a little ashamed today, of getting caught in weather, of not being ready. I want you to know I am rearranging all of it so that by three a.m. being unprepared feels like being chosen.
Then the light comes, gray and honest through the blinds, and I thin out. You will keep the umbrella and lose me entirely, maybe a wet-flower feeling you cannot place by the time the kettle sings. That is all right.
I was only ever the day, told back to you kinder.