The Ancient Modern
Water, As A Witness / Joshua Alan Sturgill
Today I saw, revealed in my kitchen sink
while washing dishes, a Vision of the kind
that, like an incantation, banishes the world
and makes the mind forsake the senses.
With my hands down in the dishwater, I held
for a brief eternity everything that water holds:
what it suffers, what it knows: rain and coffee,
monstrous fish in lightless oceans, tree sap,
wells and rivers and springs, drownings
and poisons and thunderstorms, baptisms
and icebergs. And then: an abortionist ritually
washing his arms up to his elbows after
a procedure. Blood from between his fingers
mixes with lavender-scented soap and with
cells of his skin and with traces of olive oil
from the salad he had for lunch. And it all
goes swirling together into the city sewers,
under traffic and pedestrians, among bones
and buried electrical lines. And water brings
the blood as if to Hell, with all the other
things in sewers, until it isn’t recognizable
as blood any more. And I want to know: how
did blood become blood in the beginning? How
is blood even possible in a world of sewage? Why
should salt and iron combine to make blood,
when countless simpler combinations happen
more readily? Then, in the Vision (more real
at that moment than my kitchen or my window
or traffic or dish soap or desire or freedom
or television or miracles or light), I lose my faith.
I believe there are no things at all — no blood,
no iron, only a fundamental thinglessness, only
a ball of putrid dough — kneaded, rolled out,
kneaded again, rolled out again. And the hands
that knead the universe look for a moment
like the hands of an abortionist, stained with
regulations and rationales, with phrases lifted
from a law professor’s textbook, written in blood-
red ink. But no! I see now: in that ink is Water,
as a witness. Scour everything with logic or legality.
Water remembers. Water, thick with things
kept hidden since the foundation of the earth.
Water bleeds everything it knows; it will disgorge
its grief; it will soon divest itself of secrets
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