They open a little black wing over their heads and believe they have refused me.
I know this water. It rose off my back last season, thin and weightless, carried up into the cold and let go when the cold could no longer hold it. Now it falls, finding the shortest way home, and one small warm creature lifts a stretched skin on thin ribs to turn it aside. As if a few drops could be sent elsewhere. As if there were an elsewhere.
I watch the water do what water does. It gathers along the taut edge, runs to the low point, and drops in a slow bead onto the creature's shoulder anyway. It seeps up from the ground into the coverings on their feet. It clings to their hair, their lashes, the soft flushed skin of them, which is nearly all me to begin with, a warm parcel of me walking around on land under a smaller cover, hurrying.
They hunch and scowl at the sky. They shake the wing, fold it, tuck it away, proud to have stayed dry, not feeling the tide of me moving inside them with every heartbeat, salt and warm, on loan.
Keep the little wing. Refuse the drops. Hurry under the awnings.
Every drop you turn aside still reaches the gutter, the drain, the river, the long slow road down to me, and it will lie in my dark a thousand years before it rises again to find some other shoulder. And you, small vessel, warm and briefly walking: you will come the same way, unhurried, and I will hold that water too, and not know it from the rest.