A simple glass of water

Hiatus in posting here: or: now stepping into a different river.

Strange to think of writing pieces for a web log as something apart from daily life, but the demands of the latter indeed claim priority over the state of mind required for the former.

The Heraclitean river has kept on flowing, and is an apt metaphor for what prompts me to dip my toes in again. In stimulating conversation with a woman who is a passionate activist devoted to the implementation of environmental studies in the curriculum of Ontario schools, my thoughts returned to this fledgling blog. Although it has been sitting on the shelf, what belongs here remains integral to my life but it is simply that in this life, everything is “integral”: connected, essential, downright inseparable. Right now the kitchen awaits cleaning and that in itself relates to water and its part in every action every day. I always keep a glass of water by my computer, reminding myself from time to time to take sips because this body with its major component being water, needs refreshing on a regular basis. I need water to cook, to make tea, and to clean everything from dishes to clothes and floors and body, also to give to plants even now growing indoors in the weak winter light. Each time I turn on the tap I marvel that water is readily available here, flowing pure and clear, and if need be, almost instantly hot.

Although water is a necessity of life, it is in too many parts of the word a luxury, and the lack of it in readily available potable form causes immense suffering and death.

When I sent my environmental activist friend a copy of a poem about drinking water – an eloquent, profound, simple poem – she excitedly asked for it to be posted to the list serve where she daily posts news on all manner of issues related to learning about how to green our world. I have delayed for days, not for lack of will, but because I realized that I had so much to say about water, having come across yet more writings and poems in the past week, and wanting to send off not just one poem. This poem, however, will be a beginning, a “sip” only, a slip into deeper waters.

I hope Ross Leckie won’t mind my sending out this exquisite poem from his collection, Gravity’s Plumb Line, published by Gaspereau Press in 2005. I recommend the entire book for (to quote the publisher) “his poems bring the lushness of natural abundance in contact with the process of comprehending its intricacies.” For me, his fine attention in luminous language to the dailiness of our human activities, so rooted in habit and place, expands our awareness of who we are, where we are, and what we do – even the simple act of drinking a glass of water.

A GLASS OF WATER

When you say you need water you are speaking
of the ordinary, not the fine spray of a nozzle
wisping the delicate petals in the garden,

nor the faint drizzle that is not quite fog, not quite rain.
You are likely thinking of a glass, of a liquid
sliding over that itch in your throat.

But then you notice the glass itself is water.
Its waves rippling, you can see the flow of it,
its little turbulences, its shallow remembrance

of silicon dioxide. It is, as the physicists would say,
"a supercooled liquid, rather than a true solid."
If you drop it, it sounds like an ocean against the rocks.

There is too much water, we think. We need
to take it away in drains, sewers, sluices and pipes.
But sometimes there is a thirst like a pair of scissors

cutting across the fabric of the throat. Then water
seeps into a sheet of paper and infiltrates its fibres,
gently tugging them apart and language

dissolves. It soaks the very air we breathe,
humidity as thick as a wool suit on a summer's
day. A glass of cold water has the capability

to condense droplets right out of the air.
It is so innocuous sitting there on the table.
It belongs to everyone, its sweat on a thick day

seems a sweat without work, an imaginary ease.
So many have never seen a glass of water,
they have so little of it. Will we ever hold

it in our hands again in this form of amnesia?
You forget its dribble into the future. It is the pure
source of the present, its transparent anguish.

[53] & [54] – in Ross Leckie’s Gravity’s Plumb Line, Gaspereau Press, 2005. © Ross Leckie