Born in the mysterious union of two gases, water communicates. It communicates with everything it touches, and it also communicates, cooperates with itself to an infinite, reassuring degree.
Many people have tried to unravel the mysteries of water, with science that others have simply dismissed. Some have tried with various kinds of prose. But whenever societies have faced the task of describing that for which there are no words, they have turned to poetry. I offer a few examples below.
ESTUARY
The tide at crest carries me
To the hard land of my ancestors,
Mountain glen, green onion meadow.
Ebb tide pulls me to open seastead,
Washes from me
One poem at a time.
Swirled water teems with life
When the world tilts, falling-off words
Know laughter, salt tears.
There is no way to write
This gently: There may be a plant called
Dead man fingers, in the slough, the bog,
The estuary, where my life begins or ends,
Bursting with an unshallow tongue.
Also, common birds of sudden flight,
Glorytime. In spite of all that
Slip under my womanwing!
Plunge like a gull from the infinite
To find harbor in the lee:
I offer contemplation
Of greenbunched daffodils,
Springing,
Or a rudderless leaf riding to the sea,
Home again.
Barbary Chaapel
(Find more poetry by Barbary at nonameharbor.gather.com)
The First Metaphor
The seeds of water ran down the hill
And into the valley where one
Woman listened unconsciously
Until the day she dipped her pot
And she knew: "It talks to me!"
Her people loved the shaded meaning
And they called her Talking Water
They became the Talking Water people
Till the day the metaphor dried
Out of longing for new sounds of meaning
New seeds of words were placed together
And so the water lost its power when
Mystery left the sound of language
That flowed with the water on the hill
Gerry Wass 2/27/07
SONG OF THE OLD POET
A river is flowing
from head to heart.
Denial it carries
and every hard art.
From heart to head
a current flowed back
but it caught
as a lump
in my throat.
I thought it was words,
I wrote my heart out.
Then I thought it food pois'ning,
puked up my guts.
So I felt better,
got back to work.
And the hard rain kept falling
from head to heart.
The winter is coming,
a big one they say.
The creatures prepare,
these last sunny days.
My harvest seems wanting,
tired and alone.
Cross the pond of reflection
I skip a flat stone.
And I won't let it go.
I kneel
and I sob.
I will light the old hearth yet
with the fire
of my heart.
By John Beck
Find more of John's poetry at jhbeck23@gather.com
And Summer Demands
In the search
For some way to express
the inexpressible
We respond with metaphor,
Uprooting meaning from its native soil
Planting it in a new context
And so the poets sow their crops
In the spring and the fall and winter
Few will survive in the rocky, rule-bound soil
Of the language we already speak
Those that do will pass into the great sea
Of language, calcified into the reef which upholds
The poets and their followers
Few will know that these coral skeletons
Were once shiny metaphors
No one will mourn their passing
Into the tree of ancient languages
Yet at this moment I long for a metaphor
For water
That has not already drowned in the reef
For this is summer and it too demands
New words
Gerry Wass
Listen
I came to listen to the
water
as it grumbled and chewed
loodle loodle loodle lue
daddle daddle doodle dum
as it passed through the culverts'
hole washed by time
the rhythm no mystery
its rhyme all askew
sit with me a while and
listen to the water
sing the
blues.
By Neal Wass
Find more of Neal’s poetry at leannna.gather.com
Does water communicate anything to you? Are you ready for a conversation with water, as weird as that sounds?