Cartography of an Empty Pool

The pool is a moon crater behind the library, white concrete remembering water by its chill. Leaves collect like small boats with no river, and every echo is a tide that forgot to return.

I walk its rim, a slow compass of footsteps, reading the cracks as if they were latitude. A dragonfly hovers over the deep that isn't, its blue seam stitching air to air.

Somewhere a pump sighs in a locked shed, a mechanical throat clearing for a song. The sun lowers its brass into the basin, and the floor glows as if water were a light.

At dusk, the empty holds the sky's last cobalt; I could dive and not be wet, only blue. Memory swims anyway—quiet, weightless— a school of shadows finding a depth in me.