Someone put a lid on it and the mouth is filling with water. I am not sure how quickly, but most assuredly the water will come right up to and beyond where I stand. On reddish sand that crunches beneath my boots, next to a cactus with long spines & a greyish green plant with feathery dry leaves and brown stems.
Frozen in an attitude of movement.
The plant grows. Swept up against a rock and across it, brown trunk contoured to the planes of those grey hard surfaces, leaves splayed away from the direction of the water that once flowed over it under it and around it, leaving memories of eddies and whirlpools. Small violences. Needled foliage like so many small outstretched fingers splays beyond the roots.
And I fathom the plant's near drowning.
Trying--in the wake of that liquid onslaught--to hold on. To the world it once inhabited & find a stability other than sand and roots and a reach for the sky.
There is no way out of this box canyon.
But the walls are warm and textured, and the sun filaments dusty pink flowers stretching into the breeze.
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