Toe in the Water

Of Water

Of Water

Many years ago I worked in the High Court of Zimbabwe. It was a very large and rambling building, constructed in the 1920s I'd guess, and contained several courts and many large offices. Wandering corridors connected the various parts and in some areas the building became a maze in which it was easy to get lost. Walls were thick and strong, ceilings very high and the floors were that polished, wear-resistant concrete that seems the norm for government buildings everywhere.

I was employed in the deceased estates and company liquidations section and, because there was so much space within the building, for most of my seven years there I had an office to myself. In those days I had dreams of becoming a great artist or a great writer (I had not yet decided which) and it became my habit to speed through the work so that I could have plenty of time for writing poetry or drawing afterwards. In time I could guarantee having a clear desk by about 11:00 am and would spend the rest of my day scribbling on the backs of old court reports or merely pondering and dreaming.

The powers that be eventually discovered that they could give me any amount of work and it would be done in a morning; they steadily increased my workload, perhaps to see whether I had any limits. And, not wishing to give up my free time, I accelerated to stay ahead. I worked there for seven years and, by the time I left, I must have been doing everyone else's work for them; certainly, they seemed to spend most of their days in sitting around and chatting. Perhaps that is just normal for any government department, however.

I remember a day when I was sitting back in my chair, musing, when I noticed a drop of water hanging from the ceiling just above me. There was no sign of how it had come to be there; it could have been condensation for the thick walls, narrow windows and large rooms kept the place pretty cool, or it may have been a leakage from some part of the plumbing in the floor above. But, whatever the reason for its appearance, it did not seem to grow or change. It just hung from the ceiling, being a water drop.

I watched that drop for a long time, expecting it to fall, but it did not. It seemed to have found its place in the world and have resolved to stay there forever. I pondered its existence and what it meant. After a time it dawned on me that there was much to be learned from this one drop of water and I wrote a poem about it. This was in about 1972 and is entirely reproduced from memory, so you will understand that it may have the odd word or two not quite as it was in the original; but it is as close as I can get:

O Water

Surface tension
Inner calm

Like a woman
The water drop
In grasping the holdless ceiling
Defies the sight and mind of man
Denies the fact of river
Lake and stream
Proposes cloudbed rivers borne
By windy banks
To seas and oceans
Of the sky

Your human laws
Of gravity and surface
Do not describe the natural fact
But only lend it reason

I do not subscribe to the idea that any artist should explain his work; it should stand alone for so it will have to do after his death. On this one occasion, however, I must mention that the word "describe" is not meant in its narrow sense of telling what something looks like. This is rather in the sense of "giving the complete story of" and comes very close in meaning to the word "circumscribe". And that's all I'm saying.


Line Count for the Poem: 16
Word Count for the whole essay: 643