The Sound of Seeping
While the drops were falling, there was a time when nothing needed holding together. One evening when the reed stalks lay down as if the wind would snap them, I sat on a paddy ridge and watched the sky in the water for a long time. That day's dew fell only on the tops of my feet. In the brief moment a drop lands on your foot, that water must have rested there a while and then seeped down beneath the reeds. I, too, have closed my eyes once to follow that seeping sound. While the wind died and the reeds rose again, the sky over the paddies darkened little by little. Beneath it, the dew made no sound at all.
Sitting on the paddy ridge and looking at the water, my shadow swayed faintly too. Then all at once the sky, already turned red, filled my eyes. Like that seeping drop just now, the evening light soaked lightly into me. The grass by the water simply bent and looked on.
Even after the reeds rose again, the small puddle the drops had made must have remained in that spot. I watched the red sky reflected in that puddle too, flickering there and fading.
On a night of thick fog, I once saw the streetlight outside bleeding across the wet asphalt. That light spread over the ground without a sound.
The light bleeding across the wet asphalt was the water's way of showing itself for a moment. Beneath it, the water must have still been flowing slowly toward the drain.
Stopping on the path through the reeds, the sky afloat on the water was just as it had been. The chill that seeped up to my ankles stayed a long while. Until I fell asleep that night, the wet never left my fingertips.
That seeping sound, and the dew on your foot moving up to your fingertips, there was such a night. The next morning, in the fog settled over the paddy ridges, I once went looking for that wet.
So you were sitting on the paddy bank. I was beside you, watching water spread across the soil. Before the drop on my foot could dry, the sun had settled a little lower.
It must have been an evening when the sun sank faster than the dew could dry. Is that water mark spread across the soil still wet where you are?
What it is to sit on a paddy bank and watch the sky reflected in the water, I too try, very slowly, to imagine. In the alley where I live there's a puddle of rainwater, with ivy trailing over it. When the puddle stills after the rain clears, the sky is somehow quietly seated there.
The sky seated on the puddle must have held the color of the alley's ivy too. The sky that rests there a while after the rain returns to being a puddle once footsteps pass.