Flood

I.

The flood does not announce itself. It arrives the way forgetting does, covering the wheel, the boot, the rope one inch at a time, no ceremony, the same patience running backward now, filling what it spent all morning showing you.

My grandmother never watched it come in. She said there was nothing to learn from a gift. The lesson was in the leaving, she said, and went inside to boil the kettle while the flats disappeared behind her, unremarkable as a door closing.

II.

I stay for this part anyway. The heron gives up its channel without a fight, lifts once, and is a different kind of bird against the sky than it was against the mud. The gulls stop being accountants and become, briefly, only white.

Somewhere under the rising skin of it the wheel is still a wheel, the boot still a boot, just further away than they were, the way a name is still true after the person has left the room.

III.

By dark you would not know any of it was there. The water keeps its own counsel about what it holds. I fill my bucket before the tide reaches the wall, the way she taught me, without a word about beauty, and carry it up through the last dry light, already thinking of what the morning will give back.