This is a poem called "Water."
And it's a poem about water.
It's a poem that I remember how I happened to write it
or that first impulse that sent me into the material that
eventually became this poem.
I was reading a book called Dream Interpretation
for the Millions.
There's a whole series of these books.
Fortune-Telling for the Millions,
Haunted Houses for the Millions, Astrology for the Millions.
It's called For the Millions Series.
And Dream Interpretations for the Millions
was a really terrible book.
It was alphabetically organized.
And if, presumably, you had a dream about fountains,
you would look up "fountain" and it would tell you
what the dream meant.
Invariably, the dream either meant, according to this book,
that it was good or bad in terms of your romantic life,
or good or bad in terms of your financial situation.
But I was struck when I encountered the heading
for "water."
There were three subheadings, which I rather liked.
And they were, what the water is, what the water does,
and what you do with the water.
The poem is divided into three short sections.
I hope, at that point, its connection
with Dream Interpretation for the Millions ends.
I won't read the numbers.
"Water"
Whichever way water turns, it touches itself,
turning in another direction.
Invisible now, now reflecting whoever finds himself looking
beneath the line of the wind.
You remember the rules.
Water seeks the level that pleases it,
making a place for itself wherever it chooses,
calling everything it touches its own
and falling back in its own good time.
Hundreds of feet beneath you, it creeps along a fault,
drop by drop, widening the rock, softening an edge,
breaking off a splinter.
So a cave blossoms.
Water counts the time but does not care.
You could learn from it.
Speak to it of your troubles.
Ask about your wound, why it refuses to heal.
Ask about absence.
Water has spent a long time learning
how to fill with itself the space of a missing thing.
Wherever it can go, water goes.
On your window the early frost has drawn a map,
and the small cloud of your breath
fades from the blade of the knife.
The shape of someone like yourself drifts
in the shelter of still water.
You reach down.
A maze of circles meets your hand.