Movement in the water makes me stop
on the dirt slope as I discern a shelled
animal moving around the shallows
a short distance from my steel-toed boots.
I think it's a turtle at first, a small snapping
turtle or the eastern box turtles I used to see
at home in the ponds where they swam
but too often couldn't manage to climb out.
But it's a crab scurrying through the water
with no direction or purpose, just ambling
backwards and sideways across the dirt
until it seems to notice me, my shadow,
perhaps, and it rushes off to pretend
it's just another rock in the bottom of a basin
with too few rocks to aid the fearful crab.
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