Time Pools

Your palm in the water finds three temperatures. On top it slides south. Under that a colder ribbon goes the wrong way, north, and under that something older moves sideways through the limestone.

A woman kneels on the bank in a leopard-print cap, holding a strip of mylar flat on the surface between two stones. The cap is lined with more of it: hand-drawn channels, taped notes, a column of bearings. On one note a date, 2045, is circled twice, and beside it is a stick figure holding a lantern. She holds the other end of the strip out to you.

On the bridge the streetlights flicker, twelve beats and a dark, twelve beats and a dark. The grease pencil takes a line only in the dark. If you let go, the strip goes south with the top water, blank, and her night's work with it.

Keep it flat on the water, she says.