#wetworld

by Gretchen Heffernan

1.

A night in February can close

over London like a sack over a head.

My shoes against the pavement and the squares

of lamps like inverted fires that glow and suspend  

faces inside pub windows.  I am alone.

The streets are full of strangers,

familiar to the night as foxes   

and wheels over sodden leaves

and the sound of old trains.   

These things swell in me like water

from a gutter swells a drain before it falls,

reuniting with the cavern, my body, is dry –

I have come from the desert.

2.

In the desert the oldest songs lay trapped in the dirt, forgotten

secrets among the new truths, rise up

when stomped upon like rusty little coughs.  

Everything waits

for the thing that quenches it most, water, like touch

to the imprisoned.  People too.  Are dust and tears

down cheeks like a river through a gorge.

We look like where we live – your face was so dry, cracked and dark.  

You were soil.  

We look like where we’ve been.  Together

so long ago it has become never,

so dry you felt flat when wrapped around me

as if I could have folded you

into a paper airplane and shot you

across the sky like a child’s wish.

3.

Conversation between us developed

a photograph in a murky solution,

and we sat holding our

captured moments like terrified birds

in our hands before them letting go

again and again,

watching the dark shapes of ourselves

flap away and dwindle into nothing,

silence.

4.

You live in a house at the foot of Mt. Lemon –

the eroding profile of a chief on his back, staring up

towards the sky, seeing only the underbelly of birds, real or metal, snakes slide

down his nose like clammy currents of wind and cacti pierce through his

cheekbones like prickled warts, seeping red and yellow,

here birds peck and shit.  

He is trapped by the world around him.

I bet you never think of him this way.  

Because you never think of water, that flow from flow and into the greater,

bigger sea –

5.

You have to believe.  My world now

is a wet world.  Where I soak up and wring out

like a cloth that’s mopped up a spill, your spill, you can bury spit in me

and words will rise up,

small mouth shaped flowers,

with teeth,

thirsty here in the desert.

6.

But you can forgive a desert its burns, you can

watch, melt, the evening light as it moves in purple

silhouettes, that shadow of a hand travelling over

his brown forehead like a soothing storm –   

maybe that is all he, we, needed you can say to yourself, you can

look straight at the light as it glosses, rounds off and coaxes

the spirit from its rough house, ours, you can

feel the water ease over past, those hot rocks,

easy as a flock of geese through the air that colour pulls

7.

seamlessly through, the end

of string, of a wound ball of thoughts,

running them out of the mind, you can

change shape in this light, one bird falls behind,

it leaves you, one bird takes

the lead, it leaves you, still, you can

go a long way without water,

by Gretchen Heffernan

6.

But you can forgive a desert its burns, you can

watch, melt, the evening light as it moves in purple

silhouettes, that shadow of a hand travelling over

his brown forehead like a soothing storm –   

maybe that is all he, we, needed you can say to yourself, you can

look straight at the light as it glosses, rounds off and coaxes

the spirit from its rough house, ours, you can

feel the water ease over past, those hot rocks,

by Gretchen Heffernan

7.

seamlessly through, the end

of string, of a wound ball of thoughts,

running them out of the mind, you can

change shape in this light, one bird falls behind,

it leaves you, one bird takes

the lead, it leaves you, still, you can

go a long way without water,