Weight of Water
The shifting weight of water, so like silk,
slides down what it contains. It builds and spills
like lingerie down legs to puddle floors.
It fits because it fills. There is no tuck
that brings bath water closer. Water sucks
its way up stems and hills. It has a will
to fill gaps left to fill. It drives the truck
of steam that turns the turbine and the wheels
that, flooded, force the paddles.
Water yields.
It cools and toils like Job, lifts up or roils
and gives away its power slick as oil.
It falls as silent snow or copies speech,
makes laughter as it trickles. Water flows,
yet water is a constant and defines
the dryness we call desert. Water rhymes
with what we use to blot it or it chimes
the steps of time with drips.
Direct to God
we rise from cleansing water, newly scrubbed
and rinsed of sin like mud, still all the lust
we put back on with pockets weights us down.
We wonder at the whales that do not drown
down where tall mountains rest in dark and cold.
The pressure is enormous. We grow old.
Compressed to what we are, not one bone straight,
we feel our way to stories. Shedding weight,
we push our way to darkness, sounding. We count down
to roots we can’t imagine and the song
that whales sing, like an echo, threads our blood.
2.
The weight of water fools us, bearing down
when we had thought like rain it would run off
to fill an empty aquifer or drop
to mutter in a cistern, free of salts
and used to wash girls’ hair. It does appear,
more often than expected heaven pours
a burst of cloud upon us, giving more
than we had hoped or wished for. Worse is drought
that turns the faucet handle inside out
and sucks out all emotion—love and guilt
and anger, fear and sadness. Sometimes pain
provokes a brand of desert where the wind
fills every pore with dust until a rain,
miles off, fills rims brim full and drives a wall
of mud to suffocate or flood to stall.
And sometimes water freezes and we think
it’s safe to walk upon, but cracks begin
and we are left to swim in cold or drown
down deep among the fish. Water is round
or square and deep or shallow. Water takes
the shape we choose to give it, even fakes
its presence as a lake where there is not
a drop of water near. Still water bears
more often tons than pounds. If water slays
it’s weight at work not malice. Or it shrinks
like hemorrhoids and purpose. Water fills
the chinks that purpose leaves and quickly chills
the heat of sex, the fever that is gold.
3.
The gentle hand of water wears us down
and smooths us like a stone. It is the lens
that changes our perspective, bends the line
of vision and perception, makes our aim
a measured calculation, if we care,
or hit-and-miss assumption, if we don’t.
Still, water carries back, transports the pain
that gives life its compunction, rising up,
providing current when our sales are shut.
Fast water covers sound and, if we cut
a hand, it is in water that we plunge it,
as plunge we do when weather is too hot
or insects bite, or playing hide-and-seek
we seek to hide our footprints or, if not,
then misdirect attention.
Dowsers swear
it’s water that we’re made of, that ascribes
the limit to intent and where we walk.
Or water copies waking, wipes us blank.
Yet, water is correction, is the link
that carries with it silt, adds weight to milk
and fills the breast to feed us.
Water winks
as moisture in the eye and shines on teeth,
emerges from our pores as sweat and shrinks
our shirts with armpit wetness. If we fear,
it is our palms we wipe and then our tears,
as if hands had a choice. Add water’s voice,
heard first before our birth, and mouths go dry:
no tears to weep, no spittle to rejoice.
4.
Or violently attacks us, body slams
that leave us dead or damaged, work of waves
and floods and savage currents where what’s saved
is shredded, if we’re lucky. Water’s tough,
or will be if we let it, pushes, shoves,
is macho in its way, then pulling back,
reverses flow and currents, treasures love
in quiet backward eddies, slowing time.
Or water hits the limit, drives the tide
that circumscribes extension, marks the curve
that cells aspire to, together serve
is sequence, not eternal, here and gone,
but every time replaced.
The water song,
that whales sing, that my body, not as strong
as once it was when young, can also hum
and move to when I move my feet along
the sidewalks in my town and cannot sleep.
And sing, too, when I wake and push my feet
in jeans I haven’t fastened, lift the seat
and spit before I piss, take self in hand
and shake what drops are left, then zip my pants
and sit to tie my shoes.
My morning walks,
like checkers, chess, or horseshoes, post a score
I share with wife and doctor, then again
like Ahab walk the deck, tie up loose ends
before the night arrives and darkness bends
trees, rocks, and glass to purpose. There’s no need,
as once, to set alarms before I sleep.
5.
I am a child of water, drip and spout,
the cells that fill my skin, the womb from out
of which I swam, a fish. It’s what I am:
a wieldy weight of water held by dams
and sometimes arms that hold.
If I look back,
I’m caught inside a falls, a tidal wave
convincing as Niagara. Life spills out
and overflows its pitcher, pouring doubt
like foam that’s raised on milk and spreading guilt
to make a mess that mops can never dry.
We see and hear what current offers up
of what we once cast forth.
And so I lean,
my footing lass than solid, what I mean
not always what I say and what I do,
not always intent. The parent streams
of other lives converge. I swim or fend
and in the end sink down or wash ashore,
another raft of flotsam, something more
for scavengers to gather, burn or carve.
And, yet, I want to think life’s water pure
to swallow and to bathe in like the birds
that bathe on streets in puddles. Or it seems
that water drives emotion, dictates dreams
and acts beyond compulsion, pushes need
beyond what senses touch. It’s not enough
that I should sit and listen, kiss and suck
and pinch and bite and lick. I must stand up
and reach back, pull and lift, resist the tide.
6.
There’s miles to go, I know, and miles behind.
I’m mesmerized by streetlights and the blur
that comes from hours of swimming, know this light
is my haloed vision. I have drowned,
at least the boy I was, but not the thirst
that follows nighttime swimming, or, reversed,
begins each day with coffee, juice and milk.
I think myself reluctant, but I’m not,
not even on my worst days. I betray
what’s clearly in my interest and give away
what gives me my identity: I flood.
Tears, fear and shame come easy. It’s a mood
that strikes like summer lightning, blows like rain
on Hoosier afternoons and pulls a train
of memory in its wake, the lovely smell
of earth and grass and moisture and the swell
of breasts in rain wet shirts and hard prick’s strain,
emotions I remember.
Still, it’s plain
that when rain finally stops and curbs take up
from streets that day’s collection, streams run off,
first find their way to gutters, then to drains,
I’m thankful for my body, pipes that work,
the conduits, tubes and channels still unblocked
and viaducts that carry lymph and blood,
the waste and sweat and urine given off
by pleasure and by habit.
Up above,
the moisture that I breathe collects to clouds.
7.
The fact is, water chastens. I can’t save
reflections from a stream, the flash of waves
confronted by the sun as water makes
its own iambic statement, mapping back
and back and back and back: a lapping sound
with minor variations. Rain and streams
and rivers, lakes and oceans move as one,
as my poems sound as one, as all my life’s
experiences, remembered, add to one,
repeating and hypnotic.
Whales begin
the moan of their myopic hymns alone
and sing first to themselves. The sound resounds,
a modulated whistle, shore to shore
as buoys take up the echo. Songs I sing
are also to myself. They’re what I bring
from each long day’s exhaustion, joy and grief.
The singing comes as blessing.
The relief
that comes to heart with singing and is shunned
by those who do not sing is also one
that can be touched and handled, any chord
that thumb and little finger stretched can reach,
or one hand can pour, the something more
that water in its mercy flows to teach:
the play of time and water where a beach
confronts the wear of waves and is not breached
by castles that I build and words I rhyme.
8.
The last drips are the lowest.
Last drips pause
to catch the last reflection.
Then they drop.