Does water remember
as I make my way across her
on this diagonal again?
I clear a wake,
paddles’ light splashes,
this side, then the other.
She self-heals
in a moment or two,
yet I wake-splash on.
Tomorrow it will be the same –
me launching out,
she self-healing.
I like to think
she takes a history down
as the ancient scholars would
and passes it to the next paddler
on this path
if ever that should come to pass,
and if never,
recalls my wake-splashes
as a gift
she could not hold
any other way
but in memory.
Inspired by Ian Stephen’s line (which is the title of this poem) quoted in Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways.
Poems from in between 
8 responses to “The history of my way through water”
This is great. I love the metaphor. You make it fit so well.
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Reblogged this on rivrvlogr and commented:
I don’t re-blog the poetry of others very often, but this is awesome.
I think that many of us know how this feels.
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Thank you! I so appreciate this.
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🙂 You’re welcome!
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In addition to being a lovely, meditative read, this really touched on something for me–the role of written history, photos, etc. versus human memory. And then there is the much larger memory of the Earth itself…
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Thank you. Yes. It feels I am often reaching for a kind of animistic version of Earth —- perhaps I just need to think it should all go on forever.
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It is comforting to think that someone/thing bigger and better than us could also care. I mean, if it’s just about us in the here and now, …?
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Right. Right. 🙂
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