Low Water

I.

The tide goes out like someone leaving quietly, not slamming anything, just gone, and what it leaves is inventory: a bicycle wheel, a boot, the long grey muscle of a rope that held something once and doesn't say what.

My grandmother read these flats like mail. She could tell you by the smell of the mud whether the week would hold. She never once called it beautiful. Beautiful was for people with dry shoes, she said, and went on filling her bucket.

II.

Low water is not absence. It is the shelf beneath the thing you thought was deep, the floor showing itself for an hour, saying: this is what you were floating on, this ordinary ridged brown patience, this bed that does not care that you are standing on it.

I come down here when I cannot sleep. The gulls work the shallows like accountants. The light does what light does in September, going gold and then not.

III.

Everything here is on loan. The water will come back for its rooms, will lift the rope, the boot, the wheel, will make them mysterious again, and I will stand where I am standing now and be, briefly, underwater in my memory of it.

She filled her bucket. That was the whole ceremony. I fill mine. The tide comes in.