The life apart

Once by a morning pond I stayed too long, peering where I could not wade at minnows rising from the dark, their eyes as bright as black is made. Black-eyed and gleaming black, they rose from unseen shallows, thin as those short streams of silt that swam when I thrust sticks down hard where the quiet grows. With silt as thick flesh, the pond save life to earth beneath my hand, and minnows caught the filtered light beside the minnows made of sand. Except -- the eyes that should have drawn what little light there was to them, and kept it all, turned back to me, and shone like black pearls in the dawn.