Organically, human language has a liquid quality, a flow in its overall effect, water in its consonants…. This liquidity causes a special psychic excitement that, in itself, evokes images of water.
With billow and mellow and tallow and true,
and barrow and bold and gold and blue,
what can the soul of a syllable do
but tumble over and over?
Fall with the water-falling words
as if all days were April, all rainings
fluently kind as consonantal ululation
voweling through the circling mind,
curving and diving and hurrying on
in search of the opalescent word
that changes from fish to flying bird
in the whoosh of a washing minute?
Or lands in a book, or dies on a beach
like a jellyfish lost to the ocean?
“Put it in the water,” I tell the trickster.
“It needs to somersault, see its inner sun,
turn inside out, be completely undone.
Let the water carry its flowing soul,
sound whose landfall lies in water,
whose being lives at river-heart.
Such is fountain water iridescing,
mountain waterfalls cascading
holding in their holy thunder
every sound vibration plunging
through the effluence of the falls,
pulsing for as long as it takes
to breathe a bit, come to itself,
tumbling in willow and swallow,
on the lookout for tomorrow lost
in whirling waters, circling the glint
of silver revolving, not a ray
in lone luminescence, but moonlit,
jeweled, flickering light in motion
over sky, land and water, in fire
more than one word at a time.
A syllable is not welters of words
in bursting bubbles, but the obscure
heart of language, the haunting call
of a loon sounding in the night.
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