What has Water Washed Away

ABOUT WATER
Eleanor Warner
I dreamed I was free falling 16 seconds. The
ocean was carrying my body up in enormous waves,
waves too big and too terrifying. And then pushing me
over their crested edges, into space, in that spray of
water luminous but liquid, unattached to sea, only sky.
I then fell through paralyzed air and hit the ocean again.
Too terrible the first time, it repeated. By maybe the
third time, I had learned a little, and was ready to look
down and try to see as I fell. Soon after, maybe the
fifth fall, I woke up.
I never before had seen the Gulf, never seen the sea.
I had guessed it would be the endless horizon line that
would stun me to submission, hammer the abstract awe
home. But that wasn’t it. An empty ocean horizon is
not so different from an empty desert horizon really.
No -- it was the dark, glossy surface of the water, its
weight and volume, its textures multiplying around me
on all sides. Yes, its surface. A texture so muscular, so
complex and so infinitely rippling and reflective, light
and dark, both metal and skin. It thickened, over hours,
from royal blue to purple leather to obsidian black. Its
qualities spread eternally in every direction away from
my tenuous spot on a tuna boat, its totality colossal
and its power staggering. Something the rest of my life
had left me utterly unprepared for. Then when the fish
started flying, I knew my mind had spilled.
Oh God, Oh Globe, Oh Holy Garment.
This question now confounds me. Where does that
water come from, that purple muscle? Who is its
mother? Oh soft, warm mother. Does that black glass
infinity humble itself before some kind of ocean’s
ancestors? Oh ocean’s ancestors, I like a blind placid
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