The Well
Morning.
The rope damp in his hands.
Stone cool against his knees.
He lowered the bucket.
It struck the wall,
rang once,
then went quiet.
Someone stood behind him.
He did not turn at first.
The air felt thinner,
like breath held too long.
When he looked,
she was there—
bare feet in the dust,
watching the mouth of the well
as if it might answer her.
They said nothing.
The bucket rose, heavy with water.
It spilled over his wrist,
cold enough to sting.
She reached for his hand.
Her fingers were cool.
Unfinished.
For a moment,
everything stayed.
The rope stopped burning.
The world balanced
on the sound of water
settling in the bucket.
Then it ended.
No sign.
No wind.
Light thickened.
A bird cried out.
The rope bit again.
Years later,
he still drew water there.
Sometimes, at dawn,
the air thinned.
He would pause,
hand on the rope,
and feel the place
where something once stood
and taught his body
what it would not keep.
Also in Library
Stone That Remembers the Sky
This poem listens to Angkor not as ruin, but as grammar—where moss, shadow, and proportion carry devotion forward without spectacle. What endures here is not glory, but measure: a way of standing that no longer needs witnesses.
Rice-Ghost and the Seven Drums
At harvest, the danger is not hunger but forgetting how to listen.
This folklore retelling speaks of drums struck for silence, of grain taken without gratitude, and of a narrow figure who does not punish—only waits. A tale of pacts made not with spirits, but with attention itself.
Naga Vow
A lost city sleeps in the jungle, its thresholds carved with serpents — not ornament, but law. This vow-poem enters love as sacred hunger: desire as guardianship, devotion as possession, the body speaking without language. A liturgy of heat, roots, rain, and the terrible tenderness of being claimed.
