Ring Wells

Off Poompuhar, where the Cauvery meets the bay, divers have brought up word of four wells.

Not something the sea did. Nobody sinks a well from a boat. You stand on ground that is yours to stand on, and you dig, and you set the baked rings one on another down until the water comes in sweet.

Ships drop things, and they did: a piece of a jar from the Gulf came up the same season, bitumen inside it, wine or oil, no one can say yet which. A jar says someone passed. A well says someone stayed and came back with the rope each morning.

Now the bay stands in them, salt to the rim and over it, the clay rings holding their shape around a water they were never dug for.

A tenth of it looked at. The rest after the monsoon, in January. Under all of it, a path somebody walked every day to the well and never thought of as the bottom of anything.