Water

Janisse Ray

We drink it.
We rinse our hands in it.
We dip our faces in its coolness
and hold them there.
We swim in it in suits made especially for it,
and sometimes with all our clothes on
we jump into it.

Our bodies are mostly made of it, and we need it.
We get desperate for it, parched,
and when we are thus thirsty we go
to any lengths to find it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We carry it with us in bottles
and jugs, in plastic bags.
We collect it in barrels,
pitchers and tanks.
We offer it to each other as gifts
when we visit each other’s homes.
Under the hot sun we hold it
in cups and dippers
to each other’s lips,
and we watch each other drink.
We offer it to our plants, to our crops,
to our trees, and to our animals,
and we watch them drink.

We gather food from it –
shrimp and crabs, cress and geese,
fish and turtles and potato root –
and we leave mounds
of shells and stems and bones alongside it.
We go to the edges of it,
and we shoot the animals that
come there, like us, to drink.
Sometimes we eat them,
and sometimes we simply throw
their limp bodies in.
Sometimes we eat part of them and
throw the rest in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For hours we sit in vessels upon
it, hoping
to see strange creatures
that live in it, as we
cannot live—
whales, anhingas, seals—
and be seen by them.
Sometimes when we see these creatures,
we tremble in awe and disbelief,
and sometimes
we kill them.
We study their bodies
to see what we should know.

With powders and soaps and oils,
shampoos and conditioners,
we bathe in it.
We wash our clothes in it.
We wash our floors and our dishes and our fruit
before we eat, and our cars
and everything that needs to be washed
we wash in it.
We wash our children in it.

We urinate in it and defecate in it
and spit in it. We dump our waste
in it, motor oil and sewage and chemicals.
We dump our trash in it.
We throw the dead bodies of our enemies in it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For everything we make, we use it.
We mix it with our paint.
We put it in our cakes and caulking and creosote.
We use it to wash the wood pulp that makes our paper,
and we add bleach to turn our paper white
and to whiten our sugar and our shirts and our socks.

Then we figure out complex ways to clean it.
We distill it and evaporate it
and diffuse it with ultraviolet light
and add chemicals to react
with the chemicals with which we have polluted it,
so we may use it over and over again.

We use it to run our turbines
and our locomotives and our cars and our steam
irons, and, like us, most of our machines
depend on it.
We use it to cool our engines
and nuclear rods, pipes and houses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We cut the trees up to its edges –
cypress, tupelo and water hickory, slash
pine, live oak, and cabbage palm that love it, and
strip away the verdure – titi and fetterbush,
gallberry and cattails, needlerush and spartina —
that thrive along it and in it and also love it.

We banish the wild
sturgeon that grow strong in its currents,
wood ducks and spiny mussels, dragonflies
and banded watersnakes
that need it.
When it no longer contains shad,
cooter, alligator,
pitcher plant and iris, bladderwort,
we wonder what happened.
We hate it for not being what
we remember it to be.

We dam it and ditch it and build canals
for it to run through and
take great mountains of dirt
to cover the places where it is found.
We make new things in these places.
With our bulldozers we excavate
new courses and make it go
where we desire it to flow.
We force it to run in lines instead of curves.
We build levees and dykes to keep it out.
We build holding ponds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We give it concrete banks
instead of sand ones,
instead of mud ones, clay ones,
jeweled rock ones.

We plow up to its edges and fill it
with sediment and turn it new colors
and change its habits and temperatures
and temperaments.

In our zeal to recreate the world
we annihilate bodies of it:
bogs and savannahs and sloughs,
domes where kingfishers fish,
ephemeral palaces of fairy shrimp,
vernal pools beside which flatwood
salamanders breed and tree frogs wait
on spring nights, calling
to the ones they love, “Come.”
We destroy
creeks and mudflats and drains.

Sometimes we demolish
entire marshes, rivers, bays and lagoons.
Even oceans.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When it begins to get scarce around us,
in drouth, we irrigate with it.
We dip it out by hand or with great
helicopter buckets, suck it through hoses
to put out our fires.

In one of our greatest ironies
we have been known to cover it
with slicks of oil
and set fire to it.

We know it has many forms.
We know all its forms —
dew, rain, mist, fog,
drizzle,
ice, snow, sleet,
vapor, steam.
We are jealous of shapeshifting.

We go to great lengths
to build fleets that ride upon it
so that we may be with it but
not inside its mouth,
and we name these boats
after ourselves.

We race upon it.
We float our goods to and fro
upon it.
We look down into its depths and shudder.
Sometimes we strap bottles of air
on our backs
and we go down into it,
looking at what it has created,
which is mostly hidden
from us.
We look for things
we have lost in it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We harness it,
for we are afraid of it.

It chokes us and fills
our lungs until we can no longer
breathe.
It sweeps over us in sudden tidal waves.
It surges up and laps us off our gondolas.
It turns into funnels and sucks us
off our yachts.

It turns to flood and takes away
everything we own.
We are nothing compared to its force.
Over millennia it wears even obsidian away.
It turns dead wood to grace.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And yet,
after a day in which we have used it
minute by minute
for our own will

we go down to it.
We take off our shoes and wade in it.
We cool our tired feet.
We take off all our clothes
and vault across its silvery surfaces,
like dolphins or whales,
and sometimes we simply rest,

floating
in it.

The first nine months of our lives
we live in it.
It is our beginning
as it is the beginning of everything.
It is elemental.
Thus we desire to return to it.
Thus we hold it sacred.
Thus we make it holy and bless it.
Thus we bless ourselves with it by sprinkling it on our heads
and on our holy things.
In the ultimate act of ablution
our holy men and women submerge us entirely in it.

We know the holiest among us have walked upon it.
We worship it.
We build shrines to it.
We hold festivals in honor of it
and in honor of the places where it is found.
We name things for those places –
towns and streets and cars,
businesses and each other.

We are most comfortable near it,
or beside it, or in it.
It is the greatest gift we have.
It is boundless.
It belongs to us.
It can not be destroyed.
Yet we destroy it.

We stand in awe before it.
We stand in fear before it.
We stand in need before it.

For years of our lives
we simply stand before it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes:

“Water” was written by Janisse Ray in the style of a long prose poem by Pattiann Rogers about the human relationship with animals, called “Animals and People: The Human Heart in Conflict with Itself.” Rogers’s poem was published in the Winter 1997 issue of Orion Magazine and can be found online at http://arts.envirolink.org/literary_arts/PRogers_HumanHeart.html.

Ray’s poem “Water” looks at the human relationship with water and an inherent conflict found there.

It was performed as spoken word by Dana Skelton for a trapeze dance show, “Water Body,” April 18-20 and 25-27, 2008 at Canopy Studio, Athens, Georgia, directed by aerialist Susan Murphy.

“Water” appears in Janisse Ray’s collection of poems about nature and spirit, published by Wind Publications in 2010, called A House of Branches. A copy may be obtained through www.windpub.com.