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    Practical Water
    Practical Water
    Practical Water
    Ebook168 pages1 hour

    Practical Water

    By Brenda Hillman

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry (2009)
    Runner-up for the Northern California Book Award for Poetry (2009)

    Practical Water is, like Brenda Hillman's previous two books, Cascadia and Pieces of Air in the Epic, both an elemental meditation and an ecopoetics; this time her subject is water: Taoist water, baptismal water, water from the muses' fountains, the practical waters of hydrology from which we draw our being—and the stilled water in a glass in a Senate chamber. Not since Allen Ginsberg tried to levitate the Pentagon has American poetry seen the likes of the hallucinatory wit and moral clarity that Hillman brings to Washington in her poems about Congressional Hearings on the Iraq War. Here also—because it is about many kinds of power—is a sequence of twinned lyrics for the moon, governess of tides and night vision, for visible and invisible faces. Violence and the common world, fact and dream, science and magic, intuition and perception are reconfigured as the poet explores matters of spirit in political life and earthly fate. If it is time to weep by the waters of Babylon, it is also time to touch water's living currents. No one is reimagining the possibilities of lyric poetry with more inventiveness; this is masterful work by one of our finest poets.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWesleyan University Press
    Release dateJan 1, 2012
    ISBN9780819571113
    Practical Water
    Author

    Brenda Hillman

    Brenda Hillman is the author of 11 books of poetry from Wesleyan University Press. She has co-edited numerous books, including At Your Feet by Brazilian poet Ana Cristina Cesar. A former Chancellor at the Academy of American Poets and a recent recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for innovation in literature, she is Professor Emerita at Saint Mary’s College of California and lives in the Bay Area with her husband Robert Hass.

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    • 3/5
      My interest ebbed & flowed while reading Hillman's third installment in her ecopoetic series of books organized around the 4 elements. Cascadia, the first of the series, still ranks number 1 with me.
      I do admire how Hillman is able to blend political activism with sensitivity to both the language and the environment. Language is environment after all.

    Book preview

    Practical Water - Brenda Hillman

    ONE

    (OF INTERNATIONAL WATERS)

    Water, whatever it communicates, remains always at a level.

    DAVID HUME Political Discourse of 1755

    As far as the eye sees, little garments of rain . . .

    BARBARA GUEST Constable’s Method

    . . . the third commonness with light and air . . .

    WALLACE STEVENS A River of Rivers in Connecticut

    Though this bright world of all our joy is in the human brain . . .

    WILLIAM BLAKE The Book of Urizen

    PARTITA FOR SPARROWS

    We bury the sparrows of Europe

    with found instruments,

    their breasts light as an ounce of tea

    where we had seen them off the path,

    their twin speeds of shyness & notched wings

    near the pawnbroker’s house by the canal,

    in average neighborhoods of the resisters,

    or in markets of princely delphinium & flax,

    flying from awnings at unmarked rates

    to fetch crumbs from our table half-spinning

    back to clefs of grillwork on external stairs

    we would descend much later;

    in rainy neighborhoods of the resisters

    where streets were taken one by one,

    where consciousness is a stair or path,

    we mark their domains with notched sticks

    of hickory or chestnut or ash

    because our cities of princely pallor

    should not have unmarked graves.

    Lyric work, flight of arch, death bridge

    to which patterned being is parallel:

    they came as if from the margins

    of a painting, their average hearts half-spinning

    our little hourglass up on the screen.

    PRACTICAL WATER

    What does it mean to live a moral life

    It is nearly impossible to think about this

    We went down to the creek

    The sides were filled

    with tiny watery activities

    The mind was split & mended

    Each perception divided into more

    & there were in the hearts of the water molecules

    little branches perpendicular to thought

    Had lobbied the Congress but it was dead

    Had written to the Committee on Understanding

    Had written to the middle

    middle of the middle

    class but it was drinking

    Had voted in cafes with shoplifters &

    beekeepers stirring tea made of water

    hitched to the green arc

    An ethics occurs at the edge

    of what we know

    The creek goes underground about here

    The spirits offer us a world of origins

    Owl takes its call from the drawer of the sky

    Unusually warm global warming day out

    A tiny droplet shines

    on a leaf & there your creek is found

    It has borrowed something to

    link itself to others

    We carry ourselves through the days in code

    DNA like Raskolnikov’s staircase neither

    good nor bad in itself

    Lower frequencies are the mind

    What happened to the creek

    is what happened

    to the sentence in the twentieth century

    It got social underground

    You should make yourself uncomfortable

    If not you who

    Thrush comes out from the cottony

    coyote bush glink-a-glink

    chunk drink

    trrrrrr

    turns a golden eyebrow to the ground

    We run past the plant that smells like taco sauce

    Recite words for water

    weeter wader weetar vatn

    watn voda

    [insert all languages here]

    Poor Rimbaud didn’t know how to live

    but knew how to act

    Red-legged frog in the pond sounds like him

    Uncomfortable & say a spell:

    blossom knit & heel affix

    fiddle fern in the neck of the sun

    It’s hard to be water

    to fall from faucets with fangs

    to lie under trawlers as horizons

    but you must

    Your species can’t say it

    You have to do spells & tag them

    Uncomfortable & act like you mean it

    Go to the world

    Where is it

    Go there

    ENCHANTED TWIG

    Sunlight tosses the small grasses its brain method. Once

    it gave us

    a dynamic hurt but we’ve gotten

    over it. Wobbly jay: the aspen is see-thru today,

    waiting for the Ice Age, & alphabets appear in

    every stem of it, tail shaking to a Y

    not far from ecstasy.

    The diverted creek sounds sad so maybe i better

    take our dowsing stick out to the field, for our Y will

    pull &

    find buried water. With twig lines on our face & humming. With up &

    down for the world needs

    a water-finding stick for bringing wrecked water

    sideways

    beneath blue mist—   For water wants to be equal. Water wants

       to be equal & the world

    needs women with sticks & dusk husks, since they have

    taken the husks of damselflies when they straightened

    the creek, when the golf course needed its tight white

         globals (though the cowbird’s yellow beanie eye

    will survive the terrible pocked ball)—

    Where there is a break in the fence near sweet horses we will skip

    through

    & hold down our stick in a shiny chipping field, cabbage white

    butterflies in pairs, pennyroyal—   Diet Pepsi plastic on its side

    & to the diverted creek & old creek bed

    say Meet

    this dowsing wand Come in—

    Mist rose this morning

    as i crossed the field; heard the crooked cries cry creek to me,

    cried creek to me unable that the world wants

    water girls to work with mice, chipping off the blossom

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