Water by Kathleen Raine

There is a stream that flowed before the first beginning
Of bounding form that circumscribes
Protophyte and protozoon
The passive permeable sea obeys,
Reflects, rises and falls as forces of moon and wind
Draw this way or that in weight of waves;
But the mutable water holds no trace
Of crest or ripple of whirlpool; the wave breaks,
Scatters in a thousand instantaneous drops
That fall in sphere and ovoid, the film-spun bubbles
Upheld in momentary equilibrium of strainand stress
In the ever-changing network woven between stars.

When, in the flux, the first bounding membrane
Forms, like the memory-trace of a preceding state,
When the linked organic chain
Holds against current and tide its microcosm,
Of man’s first disobedience, what first cause
Impresses without inherent being
Entities, selves, globules, vase-shapes, vortices,
Amoeboid, ovoid, pulsing or ciliate,
That check the flow of waters like forms of thought,
Pause, poised in the unremembering current
By what will be fathered in the primal matrix?
The delicate tissue of life retains, bears
The stigmata, the trace, the signature, endures
The tension of the formative moment, withstands
The passive downward deathward streaming
Leaps the falls, a salmon ascending, a tree growing.

But still the stream that flows down to stillness
Seeks the end-all of all waters,
Welcomes all solving, dissolving, undoing,
Returns, looses itself, looses self and bounds,
Body, identity, memory, sinks to forgetfulness,
The state of unknowing, unbeing,
The flux that precedes all life, that we reassume, dying,
Ceases to trouble the flowing of things with the fleeting
Dream and hope and despair of this transient perilous selving.

‘Water’ by Kathleen Raine is reproduced from The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine (2000) by permission of the Literary Estate of Kathleen Raine. Copyright 2000