The way forward is tumbling,
Your body caught in a wave
Turning you over in the thick brine
Tossed without up or down
Your head tilted and legs swept back
The water lifting you, spinning you
Towards some unknown shore.
Your first image of the sea
Was overwhelming vastness
So much water reaching to the
Very edge of the world
You hid your face and turned away in terror
Until slowly you found yourself in its precincts
And a wave knocked you head over heels
Immersing you in the immense deep.
Thales was right
We are all water
Melting like a wicked witch
As time itself melts like a Dalinian clock
The hand touched
Liquefying in your watery grasp
No solid ground but it moves
In a changing river of time.
Your body shifts as you tumble
Fluid, a different you in different water
Immersing again and again in the long spiraling stream
The mirror, water’s agent
Showing the blur of form over time.
Then, unspiraling
Pulled by the dark current of oblivion
Your arms making deep strokes of forgetting
The props of self cast off
Your name, your lust, all denuded
Shape dissolving and reconstituting
In the ceaseless rhythm of the waves.
Yet, “hydatorizon” said Parmenides of the earth
That it is rooted in water
Something persists
Proclaiming a self
Though sunk in the sea like dead men’s bones.