Inventory of a Drowned Town

They opened the valves the spring I turned nine, let the reservoir climb the church steps one at a time until the bell tower wore the lake like a collar and the weathervane pointed only down.

Now divers report the streets are still streets. The bakery keeps its door. A bicycle leans where someone forgot it against the wet brick of an hour, and trout move through the schoolroom like late, slow students learning the long arithmetic of staying.

My grandmother sold her kitchen to the engineers, took the brass clock, left the floor that knew her feet. She says the dead don't drown — they only learn to keep their windows clean against the green.

Each August the level drops and the chimneys surface, black thumbs counting the years of drought, and the town comes up for air the way a name does when you have not spoken it in a long while and find it waiting, fully furnished, in the mouth.