Under the city the little vessels have gone down into a place with no tide, no moon, no salt, and still they cannot help themselves: they pulse. All night the sound comes in waves, thud and thud and thud, and the warm creatures rise and fall inside it as though I were still moving through them.
They think they left me above, up the stairs, out past the concrete. They did not. I am in each of them, three parts of every four, sloshing in the dark cavity of the chest, and when the low sound pushes, I answer. That is not the room throbbing. That is me, remembering.
They have made their own tide down here, poor tender jugs of me, and it pulls them by the same old law. Toward the source of the pulse they drift; away they ebb; toward again. They lift their arms the way kelp lifts. They break into a shine along the skin, salt beading up, my salt, leaving them drop by drop the way it always does.
By the deep dark of the night they are half-emptied, staggering, glassy, giving me back through every pore in the heat.
I do not know what they are fleeing up there, or celebrating, or forgetting. Their small frantic reasons do not reach me any more than a name written on the beach reaches the ninth wave. I know only the water in them, and how it moves when a rhythm calls, and how obedient it stays.
Drink, little vessels. Sweat, and weep, and rise.
However far under the stone you carry me, however loud, you are on loan, and every drop is already leaning home.