The composition of this work is drawn from a poem by Langston Hughes of the same title. The poem reads: “The calm/Cool face of the river/Asked me for a kiss.” While much of Hughes's work ranges from the rabidly political to the humorous and idiosyncratic, this one poem captures a beauty and melancholy that Myers only senses at the edges of Hughes’s memoirs, which recount his early years traveling through West Africa and Europe as a merchant marine. For Myers, these lines embody a perennial loneliness– “a feeling of being caught between worlds like the figure floating above the surface of the water.”