speech pouring down

 

.

Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By ‘they’ I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.

The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer.

I came up here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield […]. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the place where men have stripped the hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!

—Thomas Merton 

Raids on the Unspeakable (1960)

.

beloved of the rivers

.

Beloved of the rivers, beset
by azure water and transparent drops,

like a tree of veins your spectre

of dark goddess biting apples:

and then awakening naked

to be tattooed by the rivers,

and in the wet heights your head

filled the world with new dew.

Water rose to your waist,

You are made of wellsprings

and lakes shone on your forehead.

From your sources of density you drew

water like vital tears

and hauled the river-beds to the sand

across the planetary night,

crossing rough, dilated stone,

breaking down on the way

all the salt of geology,

cutting through forests of compact walls

dislodging the muscles of quartz.


—Pablo Neruda

.

drawer of water

 

 .

The reflection cast from good friends is needed

until you become, without the aid of any reflector,

a drawer of water from the Sea.

Know that the reflection is at first just imitation,

but when it continues to recur,

it turns into direct realization of truth.

Until it has become direct realization,

don't part from the friends who guide you—

don't break away from the shell

if the raindrop hasn't yet become a pearl.

—Rumi

Mathnawi II: 566-568

Helminski version

.

boiling water

 

.

A serious moment for the water is 

when it boils

And though one usually regards it

merely as a convenience

To have the boiling water

available for bath or table

Occasionally there is someone

around who understands

The importance of this moment

for the water—maybe a saint,

Maybe a poet, maybe a crazy 

man, or just someone

temporarily disturbed

With his mind "floating"in a

sense, away from his deepest

Personal concerns to more

"unreal" things...

A serious moment for the island 
is when its trees
Begin to give it shade, and
another is when the ocean
washes
Big heavy things against its side.


One walks around and looks at
the island
But not really at it, at what is on
it, and one thinks,


It must be serious, even, to be this 
island, at all, here.

Since it is lying here exposed to 
the whole sea. All its


Moments might be serious. It is
serious, in such windy weather,
to be a sail
Or an open window, or a feather
flying in the street...

Seriousness, how often I have
thought of seriousness
And how little I have understood
it, except this: serious is urgent


And it has to do with change. You
say to the water,
It's not necessary to boil now,
and you turn it off. It stops


Fidgeting. And starts to cool. You
put your hand in it
And say, The water isn't serious
any more. It has the potential,


However—that urgency to give
off bubbles, to
Change itself to steam. And the
wind,


When it becomes part of a
hurricane, blowing up the 
beach
And the sand dunes can't keep it 

away.

Fainting is one sign of 
seriousness, crying is another.
Shuddering all over is another
one.

A serious moment for the
telephone is when it rings.
And a person answers, it is
Angelica, or is it you.

A serious moment for the fly is
when its wings
Are moving, and a serious
moment for the duck
Is when it swims, when it first
touches water, then spreads
Its smile upon the water...

A serious moment for the match 
is when it burst into flame... 
Serious for me that I met you, and
serious for you
That you met me, and that we do
not know


If we will ever be close to anyone
again. Serious the recognition
of the probability
That we will, although time
stretches terribly in
between... 

—Kenneth Koch

.

inform)ation

 

.

All fluid activities are in resonance. 

They mutualize and inform each other. 

The fluid inside this biosphere called Earth and the fluids of our bodies are in constant rapport. 

—Emilie Conrad

.

the woman who was water

 

.

The woman who was water
lived on the edges of rooms,
knew when to withdraw.

The woman who was water

came to Brooklyn,

and filled every basement.

The woman who was water

left all her lovers

clean.

The woman who was water

insisted no one understood her,

saw herself gentle as mist,

a rain-pearly morning, a sweet lilac fog. 

So when she battered at shingles, 

gnawed through foundations,

burst out of pipes,

she was offering love.

Why didn't people want it?

The woman who was water

was not analytical.

She knew three things:

They couldn't pass laws against her.

They couldn't declare her harmless.

They couldn't exist without her.

The woman who was water

could power a city,

or drown it.

—Enid Dame

.

phantom

 

.

Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? 
 

Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? 
 

Surely all this is not without meaning. 
 

And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, 
who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. 
 

But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans.
 

It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; 
and this is the key to it all.

—Herman Melville
Moby-Dick, 1851

.