Composition: you suddenly, after looking out idly over a dark water, see a plastic milk jug bobbing on the surface, not far away. You row up to it, you tug on it, try to pull it into the boat. You notice motion out of the corner of your eye: another jug, floating nearby. You haul the first one in (a rope attached to the handle and trails and disappears into the water), and paddle over to the other. As you pull, two, three others off in this or that direction are agitated and tremble; in this manner you collect an entire net and all its buoys, and with it all the strange live fish and marvelous discarded objects from the bottom of the lake that you had never seen.
Different simile, different subject: Feeling drained: a sink full of water and garbage that you can’t see the bottom of, little waves across the top layer of scum, which catches light in different places. You pull the plug, and all the mystery, mobility, and opacity flow out of it and down, and all the cruddy things that were floating in it are left laying out on the surface in little trails pointing to where their covering has disappeared to.
Please tell me this is an analogy about life and not what you found in the sink this morning.
Beautiful.
Detachment: approaching a small pond, you only notice that it is barely frozen over when leaves skid across it instead of sticking to the surface.