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Talking Story  by Polo

From The Asian Reporter, V17, #46 (November 13, 2007), page 7.

I wake to rain. Windward rain. Ferocious rain. Rain drumming blues bass on broad banana palm, rain thrumming tender finger tips on fragrant gardenia and slender awapuhi. Rain like no tomorrow. Rain oceanic, as if heaven’s generosity knows no end, as if rain were love and love is God speaking.

This early-early morning, I wake to rain so hard I can sleep no longer. I rise by glassy sheets of rain lit by streetlamp wash — an eerie light, thin and agitated. Light translated by rain. Light falling onto my bed, insinuating into my bad dreams. I find my ribs and trace my broken ones by it. By it, I pull on a ghostly white T and six-pleat khakis. With it, I make my way out our back door. Here my heart hurts most.

Outside, raucous rain curtains off our carport. Loud rain.

I dash for my tired old Toyota. I sprint as if rain could make my colors run, as if I had Jackie O’s bouffant. As if getting wet weren’t inevitable. And necessary.

I smack my baby’s door. She leaps to life at first twist of her key and shudders in a thousand-thousand places. Ten more than yesterday. No matter, she clears her windshield with competent sweeps. In an instant we’re rolling down this dark road faster than I can think, running from night’s last ragged dream. Torn by waking too soon. By rain speaking.

We make greens at every corner.

Downtown, only ahi and uku deliverymen, only muttering demonio and me, are already up. Men mumbling to ourselves. All yellowed by rain’s cellophaned light.

Starbucks is still closed. In a couple of hours coffee cooks and air’s conditioned and music mixes at Starbucks from one end of tidy America to the other. All together. All the same. And there’s comfort in this. Reassuring sameness, and of course pretty good coffee, in a world of uncertainty.

I yank up my brake and shut down my baby in an asphalt sea shared with Safeway, Kinkos, and my best bud Blockbuster Video. All of us under a light pole slender as a Norfolk Pine.

I crank wide my window. Out there, rain is now bigger than Kinabalu Dragon tears. Endlessly strung pearls giving their precious lives to this empty parking lot. But jewels they are, drawn from a treasure trove of infinite night. Lapis lazuli. Drawn from night packed with near and distant stars. Heavens crowded with named and unknown galaxies. A universe so unspeakably vast that elder aunties and mystics and physicists alike are left in awe.

All of that, hidden just now. A million-million miles lost from view for a few hundred feet of thick-thick overcast. Delicate earth wrapped in raiment of life-giving clouds. And then rain.

This rain.

And then, without another thought, before I can tell myself what I’m doing — I step outside. Under our pouring rain. Now I’m in this rain. In this rain like those drivers and the un-dead working graveyard.

And in this moment, our ancestor aunties gasp; our mother startles in her sleep and probably my pretty daughter too; and surely my sweet sister, our souls so braided, so far-far away, dreams this moment, our rain. This pain. My ecstasy. The Wonder.

Rain hangs heavy on my eye lashes. I cannot see. I swipe off rain and pearls, tears and snot, and examine carefully my brown hands, my veined arms left and right. No color running. No harm done. Only wet.

And my hair is not Jacqueline, nor John Fitzgerald, not even Ronald Reagan. Just wet. And still more rain. Rain like no tomorrow. Rain as if rain is love and love is God speaking.

And to me says this rain soothing my bones, our sweet rain soaking my soul: great love got you these big bad blues, great love will get you out.

* * *