When it rains all day, I wait for the sound of rain on tin roof to happen, but everything is insulated now.  And I’m far from that shack.  My father spent a whole summer putting in those windows so I could see the boundary of his field, make sure his cows didn’t find a break in the fence to the Davis land. He put sliding glass doors downstairs, a thick ladder to the loft made of old joists.  He painted one wall his version of Saturn, the colored rings stopping at the roof, but you knew where those rings were spinning to.

Then he was gone the rest of the summer, teaching for the Navy, a ship out on the Mediterranean.  With all the hammering and sawing and painting ended, I went up in the loft, stared out the windows and watched for the cows trying to sneak away, watched the rain come on, that slow curtain-hush until it came over me so loud on the tin.  And I stayed there until I got too hungry, too tired to stay.  That rain and the sound of it were the most beautiful things in the world to know.

Then the wind comes back stronger, sheens through, makes the sound of that word, sheen, a glistening brightness.  But it is dark and just the sound of the word that you feel.  From over the mountain, clouds and their lightning, and the smell of rain.

All week, we’ve shifted through one hundred degree days that can’t last forever, like the lights when the sun comes over them, like the sun when it goes out.  Fire and Ice, Frost wrote.  Some say the world will end in fire.  Some say in ice. All week it’s been fire.  All week the cicadas have clicked back their wings.

My feet perched on the rail start to get wet, and I have to pull my chair under the porch roof.  With the rain, I can smell the dog that used to live here, the thick oil of its skin.  A lazy dog, the heat now gone from its body, its fur, and above us our stars and planes washed from the sky.

My son and I stood in the pool last evening where we now live and around us storm clouds swirled gray and from them a brilliant white cloud as if the sun was still just above, ready to break.  “Eye of the storm,” he said, pointing.  Around us, somebody getting rain, but not here.  Only the wind sweeping under the young poplar branches and beech of the courtyard and the slatted steel fence around the pool.  That water so warm having held the sun all day.  A Bermuda high holding down the southeast.  And the wind cooling.  And the lightning picking its way to the center.

Two hands fence off a cicada just up from the ground yet to break from its shell, wobbling, blind toward the street.  The rain has stopped and I’m stopped at the traffic light.  She lays her hand open, lets the cicada climb on.  “Feels like a tiny crab,” she says, scooping it up, raising it against gravity, then letting it fall to her friend’s wrist who doesn’t say anything, who doesn’t, can’t move.

A man etches something into a brick wall on Taft.  Red brick.  An old apartment building with plywood windows buckling and broken glass windows—long sheets of torn glass.  But on the sidewalk, the man keeps digging at the brick with a knife, a pen.  He won’t turn around to the traffic, show us what he’s done.

On Vine, four kids run down, coming to the end of the sidewalk fast, and one girl, the oldest, skinny, yells out to the youngest up front to stop and throws her hand out at him, but she’s three kids back and her arm and hand aren’t a lasso that long and that fast.  She yells again, sharper, louder.  And he stops, shoes right on the curb’s edge.  He looks into the street, turns around.  She’s up to him now, raising her hand firm, getting it ready, but he just keeps still.  She puts her hand to her hip, shakes her head.  When he smiles, she warns him not to.

There are the ones grabbing hold of bike handles, the front rails of a porch, fingers wrapped in plastic bags full of groceries, strollers, on the phone, flicking ashes from cigarettes.  My own hands are splotched, missing pigment that you can’t see in winter, fingers too dry to open all the way. Driving around this city, its boxed streets, to the river, over, back up the hills through Eden Park, Westside, College, circling, driving, getting darker now, more rain promised.  I wonder where the woman is, if she’s still got her hand out a window catching cool rain.

One guy used to be a boxer or wants to be, and he’s on MLK going back and forth across the bridge jabbing at the air with purpose, protecting his face with gloveless hands.  All winter he did this and even with the July rain coming, he’s here now where I am.  He shifts his feet, pushes back at the clouds and air.

A teenager a little further down the brick wall we sit on to watch, eat, read — he lifts his younger brother, stands him on the brick and says, “King of the world.”  We are all kings here, lucky for this day from this place as if we are on top of a mountain.  Below, a long shadow takes over the white pools, a long cloud falling behind the sun or maybe it is the sun falling and the cloud rising into vanishing.  

It is a day of exchanges.  Sun to cloud, river to light.  The boats turning to catch shadows.  But the boats are even slower than the sun and come away empty into blinding ribbons of current.  Or they are overtaken, all of us, by the shadows.  

These clouds move like glaciers would if they were above us drifting, refusing to sink down.  No we are more like glaciers, thick with water, weighted to this point of the earth watching the afternoon shift and break us free from ourselves.  But I like to think of the clouds as glaciers, free of gravity, moving wherever they want.

When the sun returns, it sears orange behind my eyelids, all that holds me is this warmth.  The clouds break apart, reattach with their own gravity like swirls of river water finding edges of current, swirls of sky streaked by blue and yellow and bright fragments where I place myself under again and again into this world.

All week, I kept a friend’s music with me.  She gave me bluegrass violins and mandolins I had not heard.  A gift.  Always like this when I hear new music I love.  It sweeps through me like well water sunken two hundred feet under mud and rock, drilled through and brought back up cold, then down again slipping into the lungs, building a river out of the soul.  The water like music like air across the Ohio leaves you thirsty.  Drink and drink.  Never enough to fill you. 

Where is that point where music becomes water becomes air into blood?  Your compass stops turning, points you to the river, to your sister, to one concern.  Day after day, I waited and slipped from myself into the possibility of flight, hoping she would be okay.  

And she is.  My father called to tell me.  So I walked away from the river and back to my car.  I’m still trying to relax.  But the music stays on.  I can’t turn it off.  I don’t know what to do with it now.  It pours and pours into my body.  Somewhere it must be slipping out of me because there are only so many branches and arteries walled inside this skin.  I wonder what the river carries away when it leaves, and where it’s going and will I ever travel far enough to recover the pieces.