They have gathered at my edge again, upright and briefly, to make the sound they make when two of them decide to hold their portions of me together for a while.
I taste them from here. The one in the long white cloth is nine parts my water, and it is leaking, small warm rivulets down its face that fall and dry and go looking for the low places, the way all of me does. The others leak too. They call this a good thing.
They fill flat vessels with something that is mostly me, thinned with fruit and heat, and they raise the vessels and pour the water back into themselves, laughing, and I do not know the difference between their laughing and their weeping because both taste of salt.
They have drawn a line. I can hear it in the still, careful shape they make with their mouths: before this line one thing, after this line another. I do not keep lines. I have unmade the lines of stone cities that stood longer than any promise these two will make. Whatever they are dividing, the tide does not honor it.
But I do not scorn them. I love them the way I love the sand, which is to say I take it and give it and take it again, without choosing. Someday the white-cloth one will lie down and stop holding its portion of me together, and I will collect it slowly, through root and cloud and river, drop by patient drop, all the water it borrowed to weep with today.
It came from me. It is only visiting.
And when the moon calls, everything on this shore comes home.