The Memory of Water - by Amy Crutchfield
WINNER OF THE GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE 2020/2021
It occurs to me that I will remember
this time for its inbetweenness
removed from the continuity of things
and it’s as if I am a long way off
somewhere else and watching myself
– ‘The Blue City’, Al Purdy
Autonomy’s paupers, golden of limb,
summers stretched like gum,
waiting for something to happen
and then it does. We meet C.
We have sailed from Piraeus, left one empire,
not yet at another. The prow noses Thalassa.
The water parts, reassembles. There is no road
and then no wake – a churning, then nothing,
though now some posit, water has a memory.
C. has a certain luminescence;
everybody watches, everybody listens.
Joy itself is hypnotic,
a man who knows his bliss
and follows it. Who will stop him?
Rey sought to show water kept the memory
of an element it had held
long after the element had been removed.
It was a heavy hydrogen.
C. sees me. He even sees me, or seems to,
as I see myself – a very tiny woman.
Which is his secret,
though now it is mine too, and all at once
I know my talent
will not be voice or dance, but something more mithridatic:
to swallow what is dark, then swallow more.
My eyes shall grow, but not my tongue.
Port to port, the ship sails on.
Siesta hour felt the most oppressive.
The way adults would expect us to sleep
in stale cabins. To rehearse deaths
that belonged to them. While on deck
the blue bore down, and the sun stood ready
to set our lives alight.
We are a long way off
but watch, there I go,
while everybody else is resting
I hop along the alphabet, our deck
to his.
The eggs of the emerald damselfly are hatched by heat.
One hundred possible lives,
laid in an open stem or rotting wood.
Wingless nymphs emerge.
Life is a picking up and a setting down.
Through observing we effect the world. And so
I close my eyes. Though at times,
an imprint: in my pleural cavity, a tightening.
Muscles have a memory.
The conscious mind need not participate.
Perhaps C. lives there, in the cells,
somewhere beyond my reach
I walk an airless corridor; he waits to greet me.
I remember most the lotion, which he handled like an unguent,
although it was a common cream.
And I think of church wine, bought in bulk,
the barrels bumping on the bed of a truck.
And a man who waits,
to bless it with his touch, believing his intention
has the power, to turn one thing into another.
Image: Linus Nylund
This poem appeared in Island 161 in 2021. Order a print issue here.
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