In the city where it never rained, the men were dry.

In the city where it never rained, the men were dry.
They had never seen an elephant in a cloud, its trunk brimming.
They had small sun-struck eyes and, over their brown heads, hats with wide brims.

The city was from long ago, so far before.

The men sang in ahs, as if, in the morning, they were washing clothes in a river - sad that there was no river; sad, too, if there had been.

The faces of the sons had once been the faces of men: round, turned toward the faraway, waiting. But God had not yet invented the Awaited. Of the Awaited, no one had ever known the holy face.

(God, yes, existed. They needed Him so much that for Him not to exist would have been a cruelty beyond measure.)

When they became men, then, the sons turned their faces toward the near - all the way to the withered sleep in the great box.

On a night like any other, sky above and men below, the Unexpected arrived. He came with large suitcases - but without opening them, he slept under the moon with his ancient beard.

He came out of dream, ringed with sandals. Whose was he? If he had died, in his suitcase he carried the souls of whose great-great-great-grandfathers. He laughed, but no one knew his mouth, buried so deep in the beard. He raised from the ground his fragile bones and balanced a top hat on his baldness. He wore a long coat, ragged, ragged, perhaps once a tailcoat, belonging perhaps to a bridegroom, from before the city - in another place, where perhaps it rained, the perhaps-bride woke in her dress.

He kept silent. But the bird-body, the skillful hands: from the suitcases he drew what was not, and laid it wide open, strange, upon the cracked ground.

He was a maker of umbrellas.

But for how long had there been no rain to keep off! Then would the young man make the rain? Would he fetch rain from the far edges of all-that-had-gone?

Would he?

But the young man said that rain was always. The young man said:

"Rain is always."

Inha remembered the rain: it had been a light turning on and off, on and off, when Inha was a girl and drank coffee with milk. Inha had many years, the most.

Inha.

The others unremembered.

They welcomed the young man. They gave him a house, porridges.
The young man was far-near, a deserter of distances. He spoke rarely, but laughed often. And his laughter was almost weeping, because cloud.

He laughed tenderly: at the dry men in their wanting of rains.

They asked.

The little ones: an escape boat, to row across the earth. The return of a father sunk in the wind. The sweet winging of bees. A clown's shining shoe.

The grown ones: a letter with a verse, curing fever, delaying death. Joanna, John, cold, gone - resurrections, sobs of being glad. Enormous arms of a mother. Poison.

Inhas, Inhos: days walking backward, wheels turning, turning, turning. A sung rocking of dolls. That the Hour, please, not be too lonely for them.

"Does the young man make it?"

In the house: the stove, the cot, the endlessness of umbrellas.

The young man asking for ribs and cloth: his melancholy trade. The young man, prince of droughts.

From time to time they brought him a caged canary, a firefly, a portrait: drops. And they smiled, from the illusion of lightning.

But dry was the night when the young man left. Behind the windows, people dreamed in the dark.

The men knew without knowing, in the roosters' singing: that there would be no rains; that there were umbrellas at the doors, open; that there would be thirst, always, despite the water.

Thus.

And they grew so sad that they began to rain.