AQUEDUCT
Leanne Tonkin
Yesterday, I read water seventeen times — city grates, water bottles, two books, a newspaper, a lost shopping list. I saw domestic
water, swallowed three litres of it, soaked in it. Smelling water is more difficult where I now live. Briefly, inside, I was aboard Tickled Pink.
No one asked how long it has been since I left the ocean.
I answered, One thousand and one and three quarter days.
I heard, Same. The moment was too dry to respond.
To a tsunami wave very long and very low, such that it swims past ships unnoticed.
At first, I thought someone was answering her own unasked question.
And then, I assumed someone was speaking on her handsfree earphone.
I concluded it was water doing what it does, finding a way.
To Alexandria's harbour for pickling the once bustling Ancient Alexandria — its Pharos, 440 foot tall lighthouse, university
complex…
Since relocating from downtown to Montreal west, I swear water is whispering something.
Water would need to be a rogue wave to be heard downtown.
The first time I read Octavio Paz's prose poem, My Life with the Wave, I was shocked. The second time, I was shocked. The third
time, I cried as if I were Paz's wave far from home.
In 97 AD Romans ordered St. Clement to sink to the sea floor tied to an anchor for following his heart and serving others, and
thereafter he was called the Patron Saint of Anchorsmiths.
To waves of oscillation made of water circulating within the wave to elliptical orbit that don't move along with the wave form and to
waves of translation made of water surfing forward along with the wave form towards shore.
H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness.
To tree roots growing downwards hundreds of feet searching earth for water.
All things are water.
(a sentence spoken by the ancient philosopher Thales
one night when he had fallen down a well)
To the hydrothermal vents, chimnies fuming black smoke, making sounds such that the giant tube worms, shrimps, and clams find
their way home in the dark.
To the egg yolk yellow fish spray painted on those roads in Vancouver where below them fish are destined to travel for blocks and
blocks and blocks are swimming laps in my memory.
Why am I drawn to My Life with the Wave?
Because stories are held in the ocean in fluid form, they retain the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up
with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story is much more than a
storeroom of yarns. It is not dead but alive.
Four primary questions to ask before anchoring:
1.
2.
Is the anchorage protected?
Is the seabed a good holding ground?
3.
What is the depth, tidal range, and the current tide state?
4.
Is there enough room?
For what is not composed of water? Pure gold. All else is sanctified by a molecule or more.
To the pygmy seahorse, 2 cm, that was recently discovered among coral in the western Pacific. The little being was previously
mistaken for the offspring of a larger seahorse.
Octavio Paz's My Life with the Wave is a prose poem depicting a man’s romance with a wave personified as female. I am translating
Paz's poem from its original language, Spanish, because I need to know if the English version mirrors the original version.
The most subtle and weak on earth, water wears away the hardest rock drop by drop, said Lao Tze.
For letters, words, sentences seem fixed like rock when in fact what is sacred penetrates from within. If the wave's story is a treasure
inside Octavio Paz’s prose poem.
A wave is a wave is a wave.
If AQUEDUCT were a deep sea archeology dig.
STONE anchor: 1 piece, no bill, stone.
To diatoms, life's most important microorganisms, which are as old as the Jurassic Period, and yet 200 genera and 100,000 living
species inhabit the sea. They are microscopic jewels producing a quarter of earth's oxygen supply and are everything from amoebas' to
whales' staple.
Emperor Nero added cherry laurel water to the wells of his enemies.
Winter, my cat, is standing on my lap like the crest of a wave as I excavate Paz's prose poem for what is buried inside. I wade through
its third person, immigrant, other. Silence steers for some time, and my cat eventually sits down on my lap like she does when she wants me
to remain still.
To swim through the brown and then the green to arrive at the blue water.
Heathcote William’s poem speaks about the blue planet from space as a whale nation, and seven tenths of earth is water and humans
are eighty percent with a salinity akin to the sea’s, which is almost six point six billion oceans.
For a wave communicates agitation.
If My Life with the Wave were a word for word translation and Paz's wave were simply water, My Life with the Wave would suggest
Earth's most common denominator is not sacred?
For the percentage of water in the human body is thirty or seventy or eighty percent, but without debate woman is waterier and
saltier.
Water’s innateness is to bind, unify.
For WATER, is not of solid constituents, but is dissolved from precious stones above.
To the 150 new species of octopi born on earth last year.
I dreamt I was a blue whale, and as a blue whale Keats recited from inside my belly:
It [the sea] keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores.
To fish vocalizing by rubbing together their body parts until they chirp, drumming their muscles near their swim bladder, using their
fins and water hydrodynamically to change speed and direction.
For when it rains in the city everything outside looks like it's crying.
Swash marks, backwash marks, rills, steps, cusps, domes, pinholes, ripple marks. These are the wave's signatures in the sand.
tsssstsssstsssstsssstsssstsssstsssstsssstsssstsssstsssstsssstsssstsssstsssstsssstsssstsss
Friend, if you were to sing the preceding line, that is the sound the clarinet player said she heard, A wet t sound, when she listened to
the little waterfall in the solarium at Westmount Library.
USS Ramapo, 478 feet long, was en route from Manila to San Diego when a 112 foot high wave captured its stern in the wave’s
trough, and the horizon evaporated.
For Atlantik, Helgoland, Meduza, Seatopia, Tektite refer to underwater laboratories.
I asked Ecumenical Minister Ellie Hummel what comes to mind when she thinks of water, she told me when she kayaks she re-sees
how big is the ocean and small is her boat
To the Black Sea oxygenless, the boats on its floor are perfectly preserved.
Yei means water in Burmese.
The Hunza breed new glaciers. They mate part of a male glacier, which is black and full of stones, with part of a female glacier,
which is pure white, to produce a baby glacier.
The Hunza’s optimistic glacier theory hints at the glacier water they not only depend on but also deeply love.
KILLICKS anchor: 1 piece, 4 bills, stone and wood.
For ocean plants, especially the tiniest, provide between 30 and 50 percent of the planet's oxygen supply, more than rainforests.
My name means Canoe Maker. I am crafting a boat from words about water so I can learn from water how to shape myself to
everything so the percentage of me that is not water does not drown.
To Kumbh Mela for being the largest gathering on earth, and honouring water, the River Ganges.
Finland’s water is the purest, the last of the last from the last ice age which is found in bottles with a golden mermaid.
Celebrating water is causing a ripple effect of little miracles — I saw an origami sailboat floating in a puddle the size of a stop sign,
five blocks later a bigger origami sailboat was moored by a fire hydrant, the following day across town an origami frog sat by a lamppost.
To tens of thousands of active volcanoes in the sea, which is more than there is on land!
Water traffic Article 0751: When in restricted waters or close inshore, and unless unusual circumstances prevent, steam at a speed
which will not endanger other ships or craft, or property too close to the shore.
To seashells sitting at the top of Mount Everest remind me that I am smaller than a seashell.
Today like the sun my mind hides in fluffy clouds.
Most of the water on earth arrived from extra-terrestrial sources in the form of giant snockballs — massive snowballs with rocky
fillings the cosmos threw.
When I learned a Maori ancestor is a whale I was relieved to learn that there are people like me who also feel that earlier they were a
whale.
For these are the causes of waves: wind, underwater earthquakes and landslides, sun and moon’s gravitational pull, boaters and
swimmers.
To Brenda Peterson’s dad who said to mirror water: gentle enough to flow and strong enough to reshape the world.
For seamounts are cone-shaped volcanic mountains on the ocean floor.
West Coast Native Americans recognize the people who every Spring change into fish for food.
Salmon are people that live in villages underwater.
When I lived in my mom I walked around her lapping up her inner wall — cha-sui, Habitant pea soup, Tomate Arroz — and when I
could not move I drank a litre a day of her ocean.
My Life with the Wave is readable as a short story, and is printed in university anthologies because people believe few surrealist short
story examples exist from which to choose.
Water is meaningful, it is not important what it means.
For wind waves are called sea.
To sea bacteria and fungi that serve by recycling the ocean’s dead plants and animals into something ocean plant roots can digest.
The sum of many simple waves makes a sea.
To the baby dolphin suckling milk from her mother, how I wish it were different and that you won't die from the PCBs and heavy
metal toxins in your mother's milk. I am writing as fast as I can.
For 23 stone anchors were excavated from the 14th century BC Late Bronze Age wreck at Ulu Burun, Turkey in 1994. Considering
the storms I sometimes feel inside of myself as I write this, I would think 23 anchors on board AQUEDUCT is a minimum.
Nekton migrate at will and plankton, derived from a Greek word meaning that which is made to wander, are transported by the
currents.
From my desk, I can see my running shoes by the door. Lately they remind me of the first week I moved into this apartment, the
morning I determined to go for a jog, and came across a body of water, the St Lawrence River. Before I reached the river, I ran by a group of
boys in the park shooting hoops. One boy called, Run, Forest, run.
Yogi Allison breathes down into her toes to cultivate the water element.
Many times I crossed the Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Bridge in Vancouver without understanding when the bridge was
under construction in June 17, 1958 it collapsed, and 79 workers plunged 30 metres into the Burrard Inlet. Eighteen died quickly, most likely
drowned by their heavy tool belts.
For shrimpoluminescence is the miracle produced when shrimp snap open and close their chelipeds so rapidly that water cavitates,
and bubbles popping in the process light up.
I relate with water changing continuously, and understand better the term water-but-for-the-percentage-not-water more than I do
Canadian Eurasian.
A wave is almost friction free.
To the organisms alive in a lake: Ecological lacustrine.
To the earth and rocks alive in a lake: Geological lacustrine.
To the fish alive in a lake: Ichthyological lacustrine.
When the boy called, Run, Forest, run, I was reassured I was on the best path, my heart's. It was confirmed when I came across the St
Lawrence River, in Mohawk, Kaniatarowanenneh — the big waterway.
Let the halo of light encircle the young man, his bare body, pick axe, thirst thirty meters below the Sudanese earth in search of water.
CHINESE anchor: 1 piece, 1 bill, stone and wood; it was developed circa 2000 BC.
To the sea otters maintaining kelp forest communities, the only ones who eat the kelp’s predator: sea urchins.
Virginia told me that Mr Goenka, who teaches Vipassana meditation, said that if a person is surrounded by a sea of good karma, she
lacks nothing.
Is 23 anchors enough?
For a billow is a large wave of 3.4 metres caused by sheer instability.
I feel myself in Paz's wave.
Perhaps the oceans’ whispers carry far, farther, inland on wind. Am I the only one in this Montreal who hears them?
Joy to the rainiest place in Canada, Seymour Falls, B.C., 350.45 cm/year.
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
For water is mentioned 722 times in the King James Bible, which supersedes Jesus by twenty times, and tops love by 100. Water falls
short of please 33, 510 times.
For in an emergency most fish can swim ten times their body length in one second.
When old seas and new wind collide at sea, old seas rapidly increase in force.
I am a wave, I am a wave, I am a wave, I am a wave, I am a wave, I am a wave, I am a wave, I am a wave, I am a wave, I am a
wave, I am a wave, I am a wave, I am a wave, I am a wave, I am a wave, I am a wave, I am a wave?
This is the international scale for sea description: calm glassy, rippled, smooth, slight, moderate, rough, very rough, high, very high,
phenomenal.
To the beaver’s ten million year old hydrology of waterways transporting leaves, bark, herbaceous & aquatic plants.
Nusc means water in Vietnamese.
Till taught by pain Men really know not what good water's worth, said Don Juan.
Water traffic Article 2019: A vessel being inspected or undergoing trials by the Board of Inspection and Survey shall be considered as
being on detached duty until the inspection or trial is completed.
Just now on the front stoop when I noticed there was enough snow for me to kick around as I reached for what was an electric bill
and a postcard of a picture of Einstein with his words, Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts. Einstein
reminds me to at least consider even a snowflake has a dream.
For water is imagination.
What the canary was to the coal mine the Delta smelt is to the Delta River. To the Delta smelt for sacrificing its life to let us know we
are running out of water.