Andrushka

Water If I were called in To construct a religion I should make use of water. Going to church Would entail a fording To dry, different clothes; My litany would employ Images of sousing, A furious devout drench, And I should raise in the east A glass of water Where any-angled light Would congregate endlessly. (Philip Larkin) In my poetry class (853, taught by Hilda Raz), I'm doing a project focussing on water, especially on its chemical and spiritual aspects. Doing some background reading, I came across this poem. Oh Philip Larkin, why do you taunt me with your talent? For contrast, here is the first poem that I wrote for the project. It's been workshopped, but like nearly all of my own writing, I think it could be improved (feel free to leave comments). Cohesion/Tension: H2-O...H-O-H...O-H2 The drop starts slowly and gathers condensed steam. Darkly red, it traces the curve of jaw until gravity overcomes cohesion and pulls blood into water to blossom like fire and dissipate. In the pool I see myself; foam around the mouth, stubble still in patches, another drop forming just above the lip. The second drop follows the same path to chaos. And the breath of god fluttered the face of the waters, in mayim he saw his reflection— piss, semen, blood. Positive and negative, the poles of waters called to each other. Water pulls its world downward, forms a skin of tension broken by the flower of blood. Ashes to ashes, some say, dust to dust. And water? What man convinced me of my solidity? My own face flutters in the water, I patch the leak with a shred of tissue and try to restore the fiction. (Scott Cushman) I was reading about Apam Napat (Aryan god, “Son of the Waters”) and Enki/Ea (Sumerian god of water) and thinking about the role of water in the Genesis creation account. A little research into a language I have not studied (Hebrew) revealed that the word Genesis uses for water, mayim, can also mean urine, blood, or semen. Somehow this conflation of water with bodily fluids clicked in my mind with the idea of cohesion, the attraction of two identical molecules, such as the negative pole of a water molecule being attracted to the positive pole of a second water molecule. As the surface molecules are pulled downward by their attraction to the water molecules below them (unlike the molecules in the middle which are attracted equally in all directions), they create surface tension, the skin-like layer on the surface of a liquid. (An alert reader may have noticed that where I used cohesion in line 4, I should have said adhesion because the blood was clinging to a dissimilar substance—the response to this is that my point was flesh, blood, and water are the same: mayim). These two narratives of water, one theological and the other chemical, mingled in my mind in a way I felt was poetic, or at least as poetic as the wave theory of light must have seemed to Shelley when he wrote Prometheus Unbound. But like Shelley, I knew I needed a frame to make these ideas accessible. And that’s where the image of shaving comes in; it easily flows into thoughts of water and blood mixing and is a fairly regular and universal experience in a society obsessed with hair removal. One could say I went about writing completely backwards, starting with the lesson and ending with an image.

Posted by Scott on 26 October 2005 at 10/26/2005 12:51:00 PM | Permalink