Monday, January 18, 2010

Untouchable

The retention basin is full. I can't remember it being full since I was a child. The water that is in it now glistens like a lake-- it is a lake, a lake built by men because they are ever needing water-- water for their lawns, their parties, their vegetable gardens. Especially here in this dry, wasted desert where water is as beautiful as the sky that sends it crashing to the earth one month a year.

When I was a child, I would run through this park with the carefree abandon and bare feet that were my brand of transportation and movement through life. There were frogs here then. When the field was full of water and the sun was bright in the early morning sky, as far as the eye could see, marble-sized amphibians flew through the grass and air, up and down, up and down, like trillions of tiny see-saws cutting the field, miniature splashes on the flat, cool water.

Now as I sit here, there are no frogs. But if I close my eyes, the wind blows the cool smell of water to my nose, and it feels like an ocean or the sky before rain in a foreign place. And then I open my eyes and idly hear the chanting cicadas who own the summer, and see the sky shine in the iridescent blues of an abalone, and watch the touch of man stir the surface of the lake with lights of the city.

And I think that there is something untouchable about water and the night.