The Water Doesn’t Stop by Robert Hill Long
Gray morning, I come down to the kitchen and find it flowing through the clean steel sink, like someone sleep-walked here, drank, walked away. Once when my parents were drinking late with friends, I sleepwalked into the room, crawled under my mother’s legs and croaked, “Thirsty, thirsty.” I was five years old. My father picked me up and I flooded his shirt with urine. The drunken laughter was a sort of flood, too; it opened my eyes without waking me. Mother had to thumb my eyes shut as she stripped and dried me, and lay me down again. The next morning, it was an unbelievable story: it revolved around me having been there, and not there too.
I shut off both faucets, the flow doesn’t stop, no one forgot, no one’s sleepwalking. It’s a fatigue in the inner workings, something stripped, corroded, broken.
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Minutes ago I slipped through the torn wall of a house, sliding out from it toward the edge of a cliff. Far beneath, a bay, surface blackened by sharks and manta rays. The grass was slick, I was sad that I had to fall, but not struggling. In dreams, everything is the dreamer: the ruined house, the slippery slope, what’s submerged or surfacing, what’s threatening, and what wants nothing but the long slide and the letting go. Inside sleep you move wakeful and doomed, there and not there all at once.
I kneel, push my head into the cabinet, reach past the trap and turn the main valve, how easy. To be here, then not be here.
How easy to duplicate this move when things slip too far, a morning like this, no one else up—no one else, maybe, there. Just a valve like this, and the kneeling, the going in headfirst, breathing the same I’m breathing now.
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We force it to rise, it wants to fall, there’s a law.
We lift it in our arms, drag it between our legs. Packed in fat, in marrow and eye-jelly. In us as blood and blood’s restraint, as tears and the palm they splash. What we suck from the live mouth we fasten onto.
It rushes to the tip of the finger pointing out a porpoise breaching off Figure Eight Island, it approaches the flesh-edges, circles back, always ready to rush out and pull us down behind it.
The law is about seeking a level. Before the law, the water.
Up, we say and the water says Down. What we harden it melts. Unless we walk on water, we don’t walk at all. Water shining at a distance that says Come drink, grief’s water pushing its way through the eyes and the edge of the mouth.
Water making us lie down beside it, in lovemaking and in sleep prostrating, leveling us. Down to the river in the lover’s chest, the river rushing in our heads. Lying at the bottom of it looking up, able to breathe, and still having to.
Still having to.
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image by sKyLinKd.
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