One of my little vessels sits in a box of dry angles tonight, on the floor, because there is nowhere else to sit yet. I know it by its water. Every one of them carries a portion of me folded into warm rooms of skin, and this one is leaking at the eyes, slow, salt-heavy drops that taste exactly like the tide.
The room around it is bare. It echoes, which is only a way of saying the air here has not yet learned the shapes it will be asked to hold. The creature has set down a single glass of me on the floor beside it, and does not drink. It looks at the walls.
It listens to nothing arriving. It has come to a place with no one in it, and something in the small machinery of its chest keeps trying to fill the emptiness with more salt water, as though it could flood the room the way I flood a cove.
I do not know what it has left behind. Land keeps its griefs in names and rooms and other creatures, and those are dry things, and I cannot hold them. I hold only the water. And the water is not lost. It is here, in the glass, in the eyes, in the slow warm blood turning in the dark.
Give me your years, little vessel. Drink the glass or spill it; weep the whole ocean out of your face if you must. It all runs downhill in the end, through the pipes and the gutters and the long patient rivers, back to the wide low place where I am waiting.
You were never empty.
You were only, for one night, far from the rest of me.