Surface Tension

I am here on the dock, feet swinging in the not-quite-cool, watching the sun bend toward the skin of water.

There— just before he touches, when the light holds still like a question the water has yet to learn to answer.

All hanging: the dragonfly paused in the air, the ripple waiting to be a ripple, the word I haven’t said until now about how beautiful, after all, this is, how like home (except there’s never been a home).

The sun kisses its surface and suddenly I can see to the bottom— the stones smooth as prayers, the weeds floating like slow thoughts, a fish cutting through liquid light as if it knows something I’m just starting to understand.

This is what stillness becomes when it at last lets go: not the absence of motion, but how motion learns to birth itself into movement, the way water waits for light to learn how to dance, the way light learns to invite water to sing.

I pull my feet under me and curl them down, then watch the ripples glide in round circles, each one carrying a piece of the sun to the far “edges” of everything I thought I knew, of the way summer afternoons can pop like geodes opening bright only when the light finds the right place to stroke it.