Water Forms

Heather Glover

A petal falls in a thermos and floats on liquid.

Did it fall or sink?  

   And will you see it rise like steam in summer

   To the frozen brink

   Do you think?

Like the doppelganger. Like the something other.

But that’s not the way they said it was.

That’s not the way it goes –

   Running on roads

   Running on coffined roads

   Where the eye won’t go

   Where the light won’t go

   Where the eye won’t follow –

This substance drains into the hollow river.

I felt there was a river

And an ice that fogged your breath;
And there was a water death

Composed in shivers.

So the voice it comes in shivers

Like the rising sun.

   Did you see the turn-?

The thaw.

   Did you see the turn-?

The water thaw.

   Did you ever see a turn

   like I did, skating

   water thin, turning

   quietly

   like the thaw

   on the thawing water.

Your words are water.

Your words are waterdrops

And for infinity they’ll quiver

In the steepening silence of the river

Like a prophecy.

The frozen prophecy.

I profess there was no fog.

No fog and no one there to see

The wind toss up my hair

Beneath the canopy,

When the ice came down upon me.

Slipping foot first.

Slipping feet first into the water sinking

Silently, like the thaw,

When the ice came down upon me.

Silent as the thaw and like

Eternity.

I never felt like this before- so warm and formless.

As if the river run to dryness were within me.

When the ice came down upon me I

Was nothing.

It was a kind of nothing.

When something falls at the riverbend it falls too quickly.

When something falls and breaks through ice it falls away too quickly.

I fear the riverbed and a life that ripples. 

Did you see me? Do you hear me speak

When I try to speak?

   The snowdrop.

That’s not the way they said it was.

That’s not the way it goes.

Running on roads

Running on coffined roads

Where the water flows

And the petal floats

And the whole world sinks into a grave of liquid.

For there is a grave of liquid:

A water-grave.

It comes in silent waves

And floods within you.

You’re asking for the form of it –

This resting place.

But you cannot know the form of something breaking.

Oh lift me up out of this death by mud

Oh lift me up out of this death by forms of water

Lift me up for I’m baptised in holy water

and have sunken under.

Above the water grave there is the ice.

Above the ice there is the frozen ship.

Above the frozen ship there is a sky

And the sky is in the water.

So that there is no form of water.

It flows. It only echoes.