Water/Zero

After the garden, the man and woman

squatted in a field of thorns.

See, they had become like us,

although they didn’t know it yet,

knowing good and evil, which meant also

a whole bestiary of pain,

which was new to them, and so

in the infancy of their wanting

thirst and hunger, famine and drought

lacked at first their proper names,

settling slowly on their tongues

like sand blown through the teeth.

It took some time before they saw

that certain things were missing:

the beasts of the field fled from them,

the evening thrush was still.

And something else as well, a thing

that had no name was missing too,

which had been everywhere before.

What had gone? It was not in the sky,

or in the root, or in the wilted throat.

Before, it had been everywhere.

Above, the sky was blue and hard.

The leaves cracked in the wind.

They searched and searched the field in vain.

Only by digging an O in the earth,

carving and carving the shape of their grief,

did they find at last what they had lost,

and draw it up, and call it by its name.

Before, it had been everywhere.

Like nothing, it could not be

conceived. Now, in the sterile earth,

the man and woman made it into a thing.

But as with all the things that are

both intimate and necessary, they saw

how it could swallow and withhold:

the gourd dropped in the well.

The sea which never speaks.

And so they kept the words,

and made themselves a song about the whole,

their small, round world, held out to hold

a place for everything that’s lost.