High Water Mark in an Old Building

After the flood, they marked the height the water reached,
four inches down from the ceiling,
with a chalk line and the year,
as though marking the growth of a child:
something to be passed through on the way to
a more expansive and undefined whole.

But the water marked its own way,
curling like the lip of a dark shadow
across the knotted wood of the floor and walls.

Years later, the chalk line remains,
as if to assert that things will never be this bad,
as though the universe were not willful and cruel, like a child
before he learns that cruelty is to be served one spoonful at a time,
like a rich dessert in a fine restaurant.

But beneath that chalk line you find another line,
and another date. And beneath that, another,
marking an older flood, an older shadow
of another time we thought
things could only get better.