Monday, February 04, 2008 Love when it’s water By Leticia suarez-orendain
HOW long have we been virtual friends in this little L-shaped space?
We’ve never seen each other—how nice it would be to share with each other juicy snippets about the neighborhood—and yet, like clockwork, we meet here each month for our ritual.
Each month I write. Each month you look for your name in the list called Birthday Celebrants.
There’s nothing like leafing through the actual pages of a newspaper. The motion confirms that are still alive. You are holding something real in your hands. Are you smirking?
Talking about a newspaper this way must sound quaint to someone who can’t live without the god of this age, the Internet.
To someone who relies upon a “copy” of his electronic newspaper to keep him abreast with what’s happening in the world, paper must strike him as a relic of The Age of Slow Mail. It’s lumped together with the plume, fountain pen, and eraser.
This old girl may be a member of the “memory gap society” but I tell you, nothing beats the clean smell of newsprint mingling with the exhilarating aroma of the morning’s first cup of coffee.
In like manner, nothing beats love when it’s water.
In it you can immerse yourself, seek its depths, and wade its shallows. Which brings me to my prose poem for February, Love When It’s Water. Last year, I promised to write prose poems for this page for a change.
You may ask why I should sow grass seeds. That’s what I’m made to feel when I tell some people I write mushy prose poems.
“Poems are useless. They lock meaning in mysterious, convoluted sentences and they give the reader a headache from trying so hard to understand what the writer wants to say. It’s like planting grass seeds. You’re planting a source of nuisance,” a friend once told me.
Have you examined grass flowers?
There’s this grass flower so insignificant I don’t even know its name.
However, each time I see one, I stop by. Maybe it’s a wild, field daisy with flowers so tiny yet perfect: white petals ringing around its golden heart. You can still play a game of he-loves-me, he-loves-me-not with it.
It still needs water to grow just like the rest of us. Which brings me to my poem for this month. Here it is:
Nothing beats love when it’s water
In it you can immerse
Yourself, seek Its depths Wade its shallows Love when it’s water Is rain pelting upon the earth, Feeding its hungry, grass flowers Crystal beads upon the petals, Bringing a smile upon A woman with pewter hair And a pale band of skin ‘Round her ring finger. Love is water That reflects the clouds At low tide, mossy Rocks jutting out Stepping stones To an unknown journey, Fiddler crabs walking sideways Entertainers with no audience. Love when it’s water Is water trickling From the wellspring, growing Into a stream, a river Then flowing out into the sea Where it finds its power To give with no return. It’s a wave that starts at sea Remembering a promise, A mariner with no sextant Yet it finds the shore It left behind Home at last, then only To seek a new adventure again.
