The message of water

We cannot think of a time that is oceanless

Or of an ocean not littered with wastage

Or of a future that is not liable,

Like the past, to have no destination.

T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets, Dry Salvages

We end where it begins,

the river rushing out of itself

brooding down the long backbone of Cambrian rock,

carrying with it the season's detritus,

while our own losses bury themselves in the midden,

where each new beginning is of us but not us

and we ask if it is enough, this repeated process of becoming,

as we discard one life form after another.

In a cycle of tides and lost love that is endless

we cannot think of a time that is oceanless,

cannot sense if what we see

through the dark cracked glass of memory

is that there will never be a return to innocence,

that the boundaries between love and hate shift

even as we decipher maps to negotiate each day.

If a tree falls, if words lie mired in the wreckage

of empty pools of misunderstanding, what has failed?

Do we hope that water flows both ways,

believe in lives that are free of all breakage?

Or of an ocean not littered with wastage?

We enter water blindly,

through a fine mist of longing.

Somewhere in its depths we believe is absolution,

an escape from the indefinable ache

of heart trying to re-construe itself as bone,

as a calcium filled appendage more capable

of repair with plaster, walking cast, crutches,

than this drawn-out effort to stay the haemorrhaging

of loss, this distrust of anything being possible

or of a future that is not liable

like the river to drown us.

What is the message of water

as it springs from rock, an illusion of complacency,

then bursts into rapids, the froth of a thousand lattes

capturing morning and sunlight, water eating rock

with a perseverance inviting emulation?

As it hangs its sound high in the throat, each intake of breath becomes

prayer, a door opening in the chest cavity,

like a future we know to have no limitation,

like the past, to have no destination.