Dream d3545-s: The Plank Waits in Mud

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the reeds began before I expected them, tall and dry-whispering on both sides of the path, their tops brushing against a sky the color of old pewter. I had come down through a field of cut grass and then there was the path: a raised strip of earth not much wider than my shoulders, dark with moisture that had not yet fully drained.

I heard the work before I saw it. A soft rhythm of placement - something set down, shifted, set again. I slowed.

At a bend in the path where a small bridge had been, or should have been, a figure crouched at the water's edge. The planks of the crossing had washed to one side; one remained balanced between the embankment and a post driven into the mud. The figure worked at the post, testing it, adding a stone wedge at its base, pressing it with both palms. Not hurried. Not showing any impatience with the material.

I stayed at the edge of the reeds. The mud at my feet held the marks of someone's earlier passage - boot prints already beginning to fill. A blackbird moved through the reeds to my left, invisible, present only as a rustle and then a silence.

The washed-out plank lay where the flood had left it, half in water, its grain swollen and dark. The figure did not lift it. Whatever calculation was in progress, it had not yet reached that board.

I watched the stone wedge being worked into position. Tapped, not struck. The patience of it moved me. I had come this way with no intention of stopping, following a route I knew only loosely, and now I stood at the margin of someone else's attention, neither invited nor excluded.

The reeds leaned in the small wind. The water below the path was still, tannin-brown, holding a pale reflection of the sky. A grass stem had fallen across the surface and lay without moving, a thin division between the water and what the water mirrored.

I did not step forward. The work was not mine to join or to judge. The washed-out plank would be reached in its time, or it would not, and that was not a question I held the answer to. I was only here, watching the hands.

The blackbird called once from somewhere deep in the reeds, flat and certain. The figure at the post did not look up.

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