Brenda Hillman
Practical Water
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
You know that picture of Rimbaud
hair choppy bowtie untied
Rimbow rainbaud baudtie
He’s the one
An ethics occurs at the edge
of what we know
The creek goes underground about here
The spirits offer us a world of origins
Owl takes its call from the drawer of the sky
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]
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 affix
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
Brenda Hillman is author of many books and chapbooks, the most recent of which are Cascadia and Pieces of Air in the Epic published by Wesleyan University Press. She is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary.