The Tidal Wave

The tidal wave, which changed everything

rivulets of water rushing inland, up hills,
marking out fresh new valley walls where
once there had been shopping centers, for example,
stilled into an infant shoreline I could stand upon
to peer across the shining water flats, vast
feature of a suddenly foreign landscape. Then,
not all at once, but with lapping incrementality,
drip by drip the pools withdrew back to the sea
or seeped into the porous ground, to leave behind
only mudded evidence of all it had destroyed
and myself, no longer gazing on a sea but
merely standing somewhere midway up a hill
of no particular importance.