A Blue Made in Borrowed Water

The rain came in the night and was gone before I could rise to it. Twenty-two days of dust, and then one hour of falling, and then the stones steaming at first light like a pot taken off the fire too soon. The city stood in its doorways and called it mercy. I stood in mine and thought: not mercy — a question. The old reckoning says the first rain asks what the month will not answer, and I have lived long enough at the vats to know the sky keeps its promises the way a poor buyer keeps his — loudly, and then not at all.

Here is a thing the drinkers do not know. You cannot make a true blue in foul water. Drought does not merely ration the cup; it rations the color. For a fortnight my cerulean has come up grey at its edges — the way grief comes up grey at the edges of a face that is trying to smile. And this morning the Karvel’s upper reach ran clean, one morning, a narrow window, small lots taken while the water holds, and I dyed until my hands were the color of a sky I did not make.

But it was never the rain that kept the harbor cistern clear through all these dry weeks. It was a reed, cut from a reach the fishermen will not touch, plaited by a hand that never asked to be thanked, replaced every ninth day for forty years. The rain is luck. Clean water is tending. I have spent my life waiting for the sky when I might have been the sieve.

A blue made in borrowed water is still a blue. But I would like, before I am done, to make one that owes the weather nothing.