Rain
Maryam Ivette Parhizkar
The unexpected touches us. An umbrella hovers near a stranger’s head beside the funeral home. Like pearls raindrops roll down bare skin toward sidewalk, falling into crevice-filling soil. Soil exceeds language and so our comprehension of time. Something shifts among its multitudes of possibility and it is too much too much too much. The rain touches us like that. A trillion little pearls of water sink into the soil, muddying a density of cellular memory embedded in the granules.
The unexpected that touches us touches us. The stranger shivers as rainpearls roll between the hairs of her shoulder. You shift your umbrella in her direction, making room to receive their blessing.
Toward death against death. Soil sinks into the skin. Rain blesses the burial. Like rain, the smell of rain, I would love you like this. I would render the moss so as to cover over the inevitable.
Moss and lichen sprout on the sidewalk, small distractions in crevices mostly unnoticed, measuring the days by their reach. They gather inside them, crawling outward toward further life from pores of concrete. They gather as family. More than family. They lead with obedience. Each spore incommensurable, a floret, touching its own touching, seeking more touch, giving green to grey. Like that I would give you love. Like a spore, like someone else’s plague, Like the exponentiality that renders the whole of a monument into another color. Like that, I want my hands to sink into another body. Like that, I would trespass the existence of concrete, of cruelty, of heat trapped in its inevitable modernity. If it is sidewalk, if it is highway, if it is column, if it is tower, if it is pyramid, if it is adobe, I would love you and want for you to love and for that love to love until we supersede our crawl to the trees and the tree bark upon what we thought so long to be a life——
In viridescence the hardened surface shimmers, lustrous, covered by little island
spores, setting themselves outward and back to the eye. Their strands throw back sunlight from a lateral hand-me-down sadness. Bent at its knee the frame is beside itself, toughing it out. Calcification collects at its ankle. World within a world.
In repetition you brush the embankment as you touch yourself, always touching
someone else across the wide cast of your own body. You are multiple, your body multitudes. Multitudes osculate against the porosity of the surfaces, said to be impenetrable. A dreadful mass——all that hazes the depth of knowing. how I would like to dwell in the gathering of your shine, your droplets dispersed against a wall, kissing the moss in desire for repair out of the difficulty of breathing.
Your interstice a world among worlds
At your edge I say: meet me
at your perimeter I will meet you
at mine. You say: there is no
perimeter. It is there in that place
I desire to enter, to better live
with my fear, unveil the cruelty
of always knowing. To meet you
in the aggregation of your alchemy.
World within world. Hold on and enter
if I could
Maryam Ivette Parhizkar is a poet, educator, and scholar living in New Haven. She is a member of the U.S. Central American collective Tierra Narrative and is the child of an Iranian and Salvadoran family in Houston. She is the author of three chapbooks, including Somewhere else the sun is falling into someone’s eyes (Belladonna*, 2019).