The Memory of Water

 

Even when something vital has dried up,
there are those glimmerings out in the darkness,
the lights of ships passing, silent, unnamed.

Cold stars, traces of rain carried in the traces
of oxbow rivers written in a cursive script
across the ancient inland sea we know as desert.

The memory of water lies against our heart
like tribal memory, or stillborn child bearing
our mother’s mother’s mother’s name, Tressa.

And somehow I can’t put out of mind
those silent hundreds of Byzantine cisterns
that lie beneath the city called Constantinople

then, now Istanbul, stockpiling water
from faraway Thrace in eerie nether wastes,
vast chill forests of Corinthian columns

like stalagmites in manmade caverns
or some great flooded cathedral to science,
one of the greatest known achievements

of hydraulic engineering.  The largest of
the cisterns built by seven thousand slaves,
hundreds of whom died in its building.

One of the columns is engraved with tears,
tears for the slaves who died to build it.
The weight of the cistern lies on the columns,

the weight of the water on our heart.
The water that is not there anymore, and still
like faith itself, cached deep down within us.

---

Christie B. Cochrell, New Mexico Young Poet of the Year while still living in Santa Fe, now lives and writes by the ocean in Santa Cruz, California.  Her work has been published by Tin House, New Letters, Red Bird Chapbooks, and Figroot Press, among others, and has won several awards.