The Balance of our Equation

on washed-out art days and long love

The clouds gather at the very gorgeous Terrain Devon Yard, just ahead of an art day. Photo by Beth Kephart of our BIND Arts tent

The rain is plashing its way in through the thin mesh wall of the white tent in the local garden center, where I have hung my art on the curve of hooks. Your clay is getting rinsed. The pages of my handmade books on their bamboo stands on the slick presenting table are high tiding. We clatter it all to safety. We take refuge in the tight center of the ten-by-ten hoping that the sandbags will hold, that the wind won’t slash, that the rain will quit

getting this kick

out of itself. This is not

a poem. This is not the wish we had, this sluice of long rain on an art market day, when I want to say I quit and want to know that you don’t have quitting in you, because that’s the balance of our equation.

Only the rain, you might say. Only another slicking art-market day.

But you are quiet now. Standing close, not saying one way or the other, don’t worry or do, there will be another day, it’s just the luck of, until

I remember us on an evening long ago, taking shelter from a storm. You weren’t mine then and you aren’t mine still, because no one ever belongs to another. But you were the man I wanted, the man I saved for myself in a storm, marking the moment so that I would have it now, beneath this tent that buckles, ripples, threatens, spumes. Your vessels rinsed clean. My pages riding the waves. The clatter of what we’ve made also (repeatedly, again) the balance of our equation.