When I typed,
“what are you up to?”
there was nothing
at first,
until, illuminated in a cloud
of text, she arrived:
“I was drinking in the rain.”
Of course,
I understood,
this
was normaI, her layer of metaphor, I
had known her more than…I
had been the closest, were
we to have swapped voices
we would surely be
no different. So,
it was almost
nothing
to put my face inside,
find hers there,
the usual planet, glassy darkness,
a tongue of oxygen landing,
like the feet of a reptile,
only to be swept back into the body,
but the eyes, too heavy
to be moved, remaining
like twin fingerprints on glass
touching stars,
like the shells she had collected,
as a girl, after the storms on the Black Sea
had risen up, and left them. So, I said, “I know, I know.”
“No, no, you don’t, she said.
“I was actually drinking the rain.”