Witching Water

 Apr 3 2011

The well is slow to fill.

The water is hard,

and dark

with flecks of rock.

And pure enough to drink,

leaning over the sink

gasping with cold.

Like a mountain stream,

where dappled fish jump

never to be seen.

Except this water comes

from a steel pipe

bored straight into the earth,

down through broken strata

and fractured rock

into lifeless dark.

Where hard flat water, dense with cold

seems that much heavier

than the frothy surface.

Drilled blind,

where the water-witch

felt his willow wand tug,

his turgid body

amplifying signals,

quivering hands

helpless to resist.

The attraction of man and water

of like to like,

as iron filings

align with the poles,

the planet’s molten core.

I learn to use it sparingly,

the forced scarcity of a precarious well

that takes its time

recharging.

So by how much did we miss

the raging underground river

I’m certain exists

somewhere under our feet?

Limitless water

I could easily squander

conscience-free.

And when I finish

it flows downhill

into the land-locked lake

then subterranean,

through unmapped fissures, and cracks in the clay

where it seeks its level

again.

A closed loop

connected through me,

passing it on.

I am 89% water,

a transient vessel.

And like my well

slow to recharge.

An actual autobiographical poem; or at least a memoir of a balky well. Which I’m pretty much stuck with, since it would take tens of thousands of bucks to drill another; and even then, there’s no guarantee we’ll hit that mythical “raging river”.  

We’re urged to conserve water. Yet drawing from this well, and living on this lake, I know I can in good conscience use as much water as I like. The only constraint in terms of the environment is the electricity used to power the pump (which I imagine is really quite negligible.) So it’s an oppressive irony that I find myself unable to drown in these hypothetical riches.

But more than this, what I think this poem really gets at is our oneness with nature. ( I hate that sentence, it’s such a cliché. On the other hand, it says what it says, which is pretty much what  I mean. If this was part of the poem and not an explanatory note, I’m sure I would have done a lot better than “oneness with nature”!)  The water that constitutes our bodies; the air we breathe in and out of every cell:  these tie us inextricably in to nature, of which the hydrological cycle is both a great example and a great metaphor.  Except that “hydrological cycle” isn’t at all poetic! So that was the challenge of this poem:  to express this idea without getting didactic or technical.

(Although the iron filings thing might be a bit cryptic. The science here is that the earth has a core of iron. The fact that it’s molten and therefore in motion is what creates the magnetic field. Iron-to-iron. A damned important thing, this magnetic field, since without its ability to deflect cosmic radiation, life on earth would be impossible.)