Writing On Water

I don’t usually drink from bottled water. I live in a city where the tap water is pretty good. I’ve seen the source & it was full of salmon. That was during a wedding a few years back, on a bridge by a library. The river was so clear you could see to the bottom, the glitter of sand, rivulets of mud, though it was difficult to make out the salmon from the rocks. So I wonder: where does the water in this bottle come from? The label says “purified drinking water with minerals added for taste.” Colorado comes to mind, because of its mines, silver and gold, tailings and old buildings in the Rockies. But the water, being water, has been many places, and assumed many forms: oceans, lakes, rivers, clouds, tears, blood, rain & puddles in the streets of London. Wadis in Egypt. Wells in Somalia. Lakes in Lebanon. The cloud that thundered & spit lightning one afternoon in Boulder when Allen Ginsberg talked in a tent. Aqueous humor in a cat’s eyes. And when, as now, a bottle of water lies on the bed next to a book quite generally it’s a book though sometimes it’s a bottle of Tums or a magazine in this instance it’s Edgar Allan Poe’s Selected Prose, Poetry, and Eureka the water trembles in the bottle as I hit the keys of the laptop causing a ripple across the bedspread a little bounce in the mattress springs the water wobbles back and forth over the ribbed plastic of the bottle and when I grab it it’s still cool from the refrigerator. The adult human body, they say, is 60% water. According to H.H. Mitchell, Journal of Biological Chemistry 158, “the brain and heart are composed of 73% water, and the lungs are about 83% water. The skin contains 64% water, muscles and kidneys are 79%, and even the bones are water: 31%” A person can survive without water for about three days. We are steeped in water. Being is pleasant when there is water to pour into it and over it and baptize its babies and hose down its mistakes and water its flowers and vegetable gardens but it’s best when it comes pounding and crashing into a shore swelling up into a curl like the Hokusai print and then crashing down in a mad whirl of foam and do that whispery sound as it lurks up the sand in sheets carrying rocks and shells with it. And when your baby leaves you alone and nobody calls you on the phone don’t you feel like crying? I know I do. Tears are salty because they contain natural salts called electrolytes. The ocean on Titan is water and has tides created by Saturn. I have tides of feeling ebbing and intensifying in rhythms created by the gravity of whatever situation I’m currently navigating in this instance it’s just the patter of a brush on a drum in Sophie Hunger’s rendition of Le vent nous portera. Watch the surface of a quiet lake and eventually the wind will write something there on the surface something red something blonde. It’s elegant. I mean, just look. Look at the book. That curl. That evidence strolling over the pond.