Point?

I am a dot. Just a dot. Nothing that interesting.

A dot, but if you look again, if you squint from over there, I resemble a printer’s stamp, a do-dad, a curlicue, an abstract and fixed image embossed on the surface.

I am a gray-scale blob. Then again, if you come a bit closer, I am more being than blob. I stretch inside my minute circumference, both center and diameter, with appendages jutting into a sandy world.

Upside down, as I appear to be from your perspective, do I look up? To see the lapping, frothy slurp of the blue-green sea? Or sideways? Toward another landscape, something picturesque, perhaps bucolic with cows or sheep or a stand of swirling, pulsing sunflowers?

I am a stationary point. I anchor the eye in a field of disorientation. I am a point, not much more than a dot. I take up so little space in the world, in this landscape of the liminal and shifting scene of collisions between states of being — liquid, solid.

I draw the oceanic waters to me. A divining rod, I point in the wrong direction. The white froth bubbles along the edges of a thin, vaporous sheet of water. It yearns to lick the soles of my feet. Like a drain in the beach, I wait for the waves to tumble into me.

I am more than a dot. I am the enigma that the magnifying glass will not resolve. I will most likely dissolve or disperse before I reveal my secrets. A blemish on the chromatic design of curved space charted on a rectangular map, a smudged reminder of misplacement within an elementary world of imminent glass and rising seas. I am the fly in the ointment. The conundrum of composition.

Point?

I lie on my rounded palette, arms stretched chronometrically at three and ten. Is it ten minutes before or a quarter of an hour after calamity? Am I a vestige of the archive or a castaway Cassandra shipwrecked on the beach, counting down to doomsday?

There is one certainty that I can claim. I am the only absolutely unnecessary presence in this landscape. And soon, perhaps as soon as you turn to look away or close your eyes, the tide will come rushing in and sweep me from the sand.