Observations and Insights on the Nature of Things
A new monthly blog by Eve West Bessier, Poet Laureate Emerita of Silver City and Grant County, New Mexico. Look for a new post every 1st Saturday. (Photos by author.)
My heart moves like water, finding low ground, heading for the open sea.
There is no analgesic for grief, but at least physical suffering
Ends when it ends and leaves only a haunting refrain, no sensation.
Washing the wound is an ancient practice, whether to remove old blood or old trauma. Water is a shaman substance, an elemental creator spirit, a firm believer in evolution.
I am addicted to water. Not that I have a choice. Without water I would shrivel up, crack open, hallucinate, perish. Without water all that remains of me is a small mound of ash and psychic debris, nothing for my clothes or my soul to cling to. No dreams in the nighttime. No hands to wave goodbye or shake hello. What little weight I have in the world comes from the water I contain.
I am pulled to water by the insistent gravity of its mass, a mass so powerful as to outweigh battleships. Water floats cargo holds of tonnage in tuna, oil, or Toyotas by mere displacement.
When I feel removed from myself, I need submersion. A sandy pool at a natural mineral spring or a generous monsoon downpour are best, but I will settle for a cool shower.
My heart moves like water, against the window panes of past scenes.
Feelings running together as drops collide and coalesce, oily and translucent
Until the boundaries of memory and reality soften and become malleable.
I have an insatiable need to be satiated with the miracle molecule. I seek out a deep swimming hole in the bend of the Gila River, where I swim full force, the strong current holding me in place as I watch a black hawk soar in the cobalt sky and hear the river’s roar greeting me with its incessant song of water over stone. I smell the intoxicating ionization, taking in oxygen so pure and lacerated from hydrogen as to be an elixir. I am chilled awake to the core.
Or, I glide over a lake’s slick skin in my lime green kayak, birch paddles cupping sensuous billows and creating swirling eddies. In the slime and dust of its depths, I see sinuous weeds caress rainbow trout scales, pollywogs and darting insect larvae. Sunlight reflects back into my eyes like Fourth of July sparklers, or crepuscular rays so psychedelic as to mesmerize.
My heart moves like water, collecting in rock depressions and soft earth.
Love can be both poignant and indefinable, a music of inaudible notes.
I want to know water viscerally, like an embryo knows amniotic fluid. I want to remember everything clearly. The agony, the ecstasy. The ordinary, the extraordinary.
Water seeks out low ground but without humility. If you think you are on sure footing, even the smallest amount of water will prove your security premature. Water on the move will sweep you off your feet faster than love.
My heart moves like water, dragging old skins from mountains downstream,
Carrying debris and soil with uncompromising force and stubbornness.
Depositing the past into the present, agate and aggregate alike, gem and clod.
Water agitated and enraged by wind devastates entire cities and coastlines, submerging everything: toaster ovens, televisions, toothpaste, feather pillows, leather boots, photo albums, rosaries, under a sludge of mud, oil, grit, waste and regret.
Water is as easily bully as healer. Trapped in its own cyclic evolutions, water is as much captive as captivating. Still, water on the move will sweep you clean of your heart’s agony faster than time.
My heart moves like water, the way tears adhere to their own salts and slip
With gravity over cheeks, pooling in pores and at the edges of parted lips.
When grief reaches its source, sunlight evaporates pain and water is free
To drift to the mountains again.
Scroll down to About The Author for more information and check out Eve’s website at: www.jazzpoeteve.com
