Practical Water

Practical Water

4 P R A C T I C A L WAT E R What does it mean to live a moral life It is nearly impossible to think about this We went down to the creek The sides were filled with tiny watery activities The mind was split & mended Each perception divided into more & there were in the hearts of the water molecules little branches perpendicular to thought Had lobbied the Congress but it was dead Had written to the Committee on Understanding Had written to the middle middle of the middle class but it was drinking Had voted in cafes with shoplifters & beekeepers stirring tea made of water hitched to the green arc An ethics occurs at the edge of what we know The creek goes underground about here The spirits o‡er us a world of origins Owl takes its call from the drawer of the sky 5 Unusually warm global warming day out A tiny droplet shines on a leaf & there your creek is found It has borrowed something to link itself to others We carry ourselves through the days in code dna like Raskolnikov’s staircase neither good nor bad in itself Lower frequencies are the mind What happened to the creek is what happened to the sentence in the twentieth century It got social underground You should make yourself uncomfortable If not you who Thrush comes out from the cottony coyote bush glink-a-glink chunk drink trrrrrr turns a golden eyebrow to the ground We run past the plant that smells like taco sauce Recite words for water weeter wader weetar vatn watn voda [insert all languages here] 6 Poor Rimbaud didn’t know how to live but knew how to act Red-legged frog in the pond sounds like him Uncomfortable & say a spell: blossom knit & heel a·x fiddle fern in the neck of the sun It’s hard to be water to fall from faucets with fangs to lie under trawlers as horizons but you must Your species can’t say it You have to do spells & tag them Uncomfortable & act like you mean it Go to the world Where is it Go there ...