Seeks Its Own Level

1.
In the city, a child fills a shovel with snow from a ridge the plow made, then stands between parked cars and dips the blade in the flowing gutter. The snow bleeds clear in water that tangles toward the storm drain, dragging filter tips and ripped leaves. That drain is a horror, its stretched mouth. Surely it’s too narrow to take her, but aren’t there places you can’t see coming where the rules don’t apply and then you’re gone?

2.
The boys fill plastic buckets from the spigot near the bathrooms and stiff-leg it back to the playground, built on sand. They pour the contents into the hole they dug beneath the slide and run back for refills, over and over. An entire swimming pool at their disposal, but they love this best, water they can master, earth that swallows only so much before the water settles in to make a pond.

3.
Some summers it never rains. The river shrinks, skeleton protruding. They let the child’s bathwater stand overnight and, in the morning, carry it in soup pots to pour on the peppers and tomatoes. Some years it rains so much the river is a foaming brown pestilence among trees. Storm sewers back up into rec rooms. The lawnmower’s wheels cut black spirals, a hieroglyphic curse when seen from a low-flying plane.

4.
By June, the creek behind the house is barely deep enough to wet her feet. The ooze at the bottom feels the way cool juice tastes. It’s a blessing she never asked for, jagged comma, pause in the downward slope, visible on no map, a crease in the succession of years, banks thick with violets and touch-me-nots, star moss, two-inch seedlings that yearn toward the branches that dropped them.