On Water

I

A single liquid orb in roundness bound

The retina accepts the image upside-down

All colour, shape, all line, all forms in sight

Encompass liquidity, expressed within

An image of the world, sky, sea and earth.

Perpetual change condensed into

A floating film – an aqueous humour.

Everything is surface to the eye and

Even the bubbling runnels seem to laugh

An inexhaustible tremulous display.

II

Depth changes the colours under the sheen,

Tiny waves, drawn by current, catch the wind

Like miniature sails. Skittering water finds a purpose

Reversing, turning upon its head.

I feel water’s deeps press down upon my form.

A drift slanting my lifeless body across the flow.

III

Black penned, disturbed with darkened water

Thick glass reflecting a surface sliding –

Flat, curved or reticulated descending slaughter

Defies the depth – colour is riding

Down darkened like an ink-dropper droplet sinks

Tells that death is foreshadowed, foretold

In the deep declivities of silt beneath

Everything has life and death in water

Our coming, our being, our sacraments

Our end. Holy water splashing on the coffin lid.

IV

I have bathed in the river, washed my head

Beneath the flow on the Isle Barbe

A refuge from normality.

Then taking the wine bottle by the neck

Re-visiting our moment on the prow of the Isle de la Cité

Plastic cap picked off to suck down a rasping

Vinegar. Vin de table splashing over my lips and chin

Hardly room for my feet above the flow

Of the Saône.

V

Turning within itself, current reaches

Up and plunges down.

VI  

Boys diving off the pier at Clogherhead

Sporting, flirting with the savage rocks

That tear the flesh and break their legs beneath.

Not far away the sacred head ensconced

In Drogheda looks out from emptiness

Nothing sees or knows or wants to know

“I’d say he could have a woeful thairst on him,

And badly needs a slaking pint. Or two.

It’s mostly water, you know, like rain is.”

VII

We know the sadness and the sorrow,

We see the tears

As Jesus wept over Jerusalem

And when he learned of Lazarus’s death.

Compassion flowed

Vulnerable and humble.

VIII

Lacrimal glands seer our cheeks.

The proteins, lipids and mucins.

His too. Salty fluid evaporates on the skin.

Sodium electrolytes, chloride, potassium,

Calcium and magnesium.

IX

I have to wash before I go to Mass

Wash in the cool water of Vaulx-Milieu.

Dabble in a nearby lake.

Wash away my pettifogging imbecilities

My peccadillos which I have to ask be washed

Away by The Great Sinner who washed away

All our sins. Who took our sins before and

Ahead unto himself.

Abluted now in the cool after-rain descent.

I have washed clean my body, which is

Washed clean before I start by The Great Sinner.

X

A huge confession of desire. Those nuns

In their fastness, spending years

On their knees in different parts of the world

A tragic order struggling through meaning

Wanting it to have the purity they seek

In themselves, knowing it can never be.

Seeking a certainty they cannot ever achieve

Because they know themselves.

They seem as far from the benediction of water

As their desert brothers are.

And up the hill, the Carthusians assay

Life in their cells. Each a single assay

Of themselves as a part of Christ. Remaining true

Across life and outside it, and beyond it.

Taking part in it but secretly and working, working

In individual relation to life, the world and God.

All their lives. Unto death and beyond.

Here, there is an outside and an inside.

Outside their entrance way,

there is a tap for those who thirst.

But it is non potable we are warned.

What is the water inside then?

They intend their lives to be like water. Flowing

Everywhere they are. A tsunami. An ebb tide. A lee shore.

A wide Sargasso sea. The Gyre of life. The Gybe of death. An expression of God’s will.

Further up the hill, Alpine waterfalls: the Cascade des Dioux. [d’you]

XI

I want to encompass the seas and make up

The fragile fluid entity.

I am the lapping waves

Slapping against the clinker-built hull

I am the endless lagoon of

Purple echoing the sky

The passage of purple clouds

Among the greenwood trees

I am a pen gliding over a

Smooth immaculate substrate

No tooth, no texture.

I am a brush loaded with watercolour colouring a ground

And filling the eye.

I am a sun-filled portion

Seen through my fingers.

I am the earth absorbing all

The angles of my back.

I am alive and I am dead

Uttering the endless breath

And laughing within the sight of water.

XII

Do I hear a lilting benediction

In the echoes in a park?

Do I feel a shiver in the cool evening air?

Can I sense my rest in you

Enveloping each other in the sun

Breathing deep in my ear?

Do I feel your heart’s murmur

Under my hand?

Do you hear

Do you hear

Do you hear my heart next to yours?

A complex paradiddle of cross-rhythms – sometimes consonant

Sometimes arrhythmic. Syncopated syncope.

I am a beating heart.

I am alive.

XIII

And shall I drag my feet once more to Mass?

The water and the wine.

Witness once again the drama of the tabernacle?

I could not look inside – for Christ was there –

Too great, too big a thing to contemplate or see

Too full of meaning –

The whole world

Inside a cupboard.

The endless love.

Perfection.

Kept under lock and key

There permanently.

Too glorious to see.

Too glorious to know.

I avert my eyes.

Either the Ancients did not understand.

Or understood too well.

Is it perhaps Pandora’s box?

Was Hope trapped inside and never released into the world

Or was Hope too released, when all else had ravaged the world.

Is this the essential sacrament?

The tabernacle contains Hope.

And I know

I know

I do not know

XIV

Everything dissolves in water or is reflected in it,

Everything is carried in water or floats on it.

Even for poets where these ten syllables are our epitaph

As they were his, self-written:

“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”