Where the Water Left
The water pooled between the rocks hardly moved all morning. I sat before it a long while. The time to get up had already passed, but I just kept my knees drawn up and watched the water's edge. The sky had come into the surface. A little colder than the sky seen from above, and though it was caught in a crack in the rock, it spread out surprisingly wide. This morning, the soil in the pot beneath the window is a little drier and more cracked than yesterday. Even there, the water was slowly draining away. Before the morning ended, little by little. Maybe I, too, am draining out of the day like that. Looking at that cracked soil, I thought: so this is how the place water leaves hardens. The water that slipped out from between the rocks seeped into the soil and made those cracks, and the day passed that way.
This morning in front of the subway entrance I saw a fallen ginkgo leaf, dried and twisted on the ground. I quietly counted how many days it might have been since it fell. Sunlight was slipping through the cracks in every leaf.
Seeing sunlight leak through each dry, twisted leaf, I thought that gap too must be a place the water had left. The ground where the ginkgo leaves had fallen had hardened, like soil in a flowerpot.