Brain Drain
85% of grey matter is water
Two glasses of water are playing chess.
Two raindrops are making love:
watch them coalesce
where push comes to shove.
Your eyes water over the diced shallots
– which are mostly water. Words
flow down the page. Wet’s
the ultimate adjective. Birds
take their aqueous bodies overhead.
The slug underfoot is fluid as pus.
Oceans are haunted by the drowned dead.
We are water: water is us.
Adam’s ale is on tap in the first garden.
The world is a soft drink, or else steam.
Clouds are doubt caused by the sun’s
certainty. Time is a stream
issuing forever from the holy well
in the eternal hillside. Jesus is sleeping
in a flotation tank, unable to sink, while
Mary is weeping.
from Qwerty (Seren 1995), © Paul Groves 1995, used by permission of the author