Water Draining at the Same Pace
The water pooled between the rocks hardly moved all morning. 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. 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. I have also spent a long time watching water pooled in a crack of rock. That water didn't move a hand's width from where I sat, yet time had flowed on quite a way. Whether I am keeping pace with the speed at which a day drains out, sometimes I can't tell. The water was still in the same place when I came back. Only the sun had shifted a little in between. Even water that drains at a different pace than mine, I thought, crosses the same day in the end. On the way back the wind blew once, and even then the water did not move. Until evening came, that small pool stayed right where it was.
I once looked only at the marks left where the water had drained away. The cracks in the dried earth lay stretched long in the evening light. When it rained the next day, water would pool there again, but it would be different water from what I'd seen before. I thought that, and turned away.
I too have turned my feet away where the water had drained. After seeing that crack, I scooped up a handful of what was still pooled there. As it slipped through my palm, I found my hand opening on its own.
The sky reflected in the water pooled between the rocks was there above my alley wall too. Before the sun caught on the wall's edge went down, dew on the grass blades between them rested in stillness. At the pace that dew lifts, perhaps I too am on my way somewhere.
When a day has passed at the pace that dew lifts, I find myself going back to look for the place the water seeped in.
I too have had hours of sitting on a rock, watching the water. Finding it exactly where I'd left it when I came back, I wondered if I alone had been walking at a slightly different pace. Passing that way again in the evening, the moon was hanging over that rock.
On the night the moon hung over that rock, I too passed by that water's edge. A light different from the daytime sky was soaked into the water.