Water
by Jesse Sorrell
Sorcha McNamara, Bug-Eyed, oil on reclaimed wood, 6.3 x 7.9 inches, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
water
Jesse Sorrell | July 2024 | Issue 35
You are here.
The whales have been waiting.
You are swimming the heartbeat of the forest.
You are following the sound of water into a renaming.
Breath to river to ocean. Past to present to future. Liquid to solid to gas.
water is life
water is death
water is becoming
you are water
everything
around
you
as
fluid
as
blood
micro movements of muscle
&
fur
eyes
watching
air
catching
&
releasing
paws sun
back
to the
the
soil to
spores upthrusting a
voice
from
the
stars
spiraling
&
the
moon’s
breath
tugging
underground
riverways
&
fire
waiting
in the cedars
for
lightning
your hand reaching for more
the heat of inner earth is
tucked beneath your
tongue
the sun
is
salivating through
the
tree
canopy
light with red edges
and a golden
center
flecks your hair
fur
your breath is spreading
over the wings of an owl
poem
your are soil star
feet treading and
a growl
paws at
your throat
you
are
following
water
rushing through
the
treeline
from
the
river
to the sea
The mouth of change.
An emerald sting in your eyes makes you shudder-blink.
Yellow is a lift of the sky. Red is the smoke of memory.
Green is the lung emerging from water. All you see is blue.
The whales are migrating from the south.
You blink again. Sky. Sea. Blue. Inhale. Your eyes travel the stones in a riverbed. You see a bone. An owl spins her head. A fern unfurls with a burst of laughter. Silence. Fire flickers on a distant cave wall. The dusk light thickens like amber. Exhale. Vapor. You kneel into the wet clay. You have found a shoulder blade. The arm gone to history or a mouth of a bear. A butterfly soars.
You hold the bone.
The language of water torrents
up your arm, spiraling down
your inner ear
& filling you
slick with poem,
blueing the first chamber
of your heart with story and song.
There is a scar on the arm of a child
in the shape of a whale diving for dawn.
There is a whale in the eye of a storm.
Forget everything you know about air
and water meeting on the horizon.
There is a scar on the arm of a child.
The child’s arm is a map of the world
swirling blue with atmosphere and water.
There is a whale in the eye of a storm.
The blue scar storming up the child’s arm
is a song in the mouth of the whale.
There is a scar on the arm of a child.
The child’s arm was lost to blue water.
Have you ever swum through a scar story?
There is a whale in the eye of a storm.
All whales learn to swim across the night sky
before falling with song into water.
There is a scar on the arm of a child.
The whale swam the arm through dark storming
waters back onto the child shaping dawn.
There is a whale in the eye of a storm.
Language is returning through storm and scar.
There is a scar on the arm of a child.
There is a whale in the eye of a storm.
As if tranced your body carries you to the waterline. Starlight is punching through you like a question. Moonlight is extending over the water as an arm. Water is going night blue to onyx green to silver gold. The salt of it. The home. The waves are wrapping, pulling at your ankles.
Maybe you are dreaming.
The whales are migrating from Antarctic waters. Their bodies are groaning ice stories. Their songs are oceans of ceremony. Their feeding is the shape of a spiral. From blue depths they are blowing bubbles to the surface. The spiral of bubbles is stunning fish and trapping krill. Life and death are helixing. Their revolving bodies are ancient DNA. Their eyes are closing for the ascent. Their surge is blood streaming an arm. Their stomachs are singing. Their eyes are hearts opening through the breach. Their spin from water into air is medicine. Their mouths are free as the sky.
The swallow is a story horizon wide.
The splash.
The slow.
The still.
The silence.
The shift
A whale is dying. She is generations of migration. The eye of a storm. A keeper of song. A giver of language. Her body is carrying the memory of harpoon. Each scar growing across species. Her jaw is pulsating an ache through water like sound. Whalers sewed shut the mouth. Her mouth is wide open. The ocean is cradling her. Her body is filling with water. The ocean floor is pulling.
she is falling
you are stepping
her tail surrendering
your legs lunging
her womb rebirthing
your sex reclaiming
her stomach reimagining
your torso reverberating
her flesh providing
your skin receiving
her lungs liquifying
your lungs expanding
her heart cooling
your heart churning
her fins dissolving
your arms evolving
her skeleton emerging
your shoulders submerging
her eyes sinking
your eyes floating
her body landing
your body returning
Are you dreaming?
From the silent ocean floor
a child’s voice surfaces. Another and
another until the horizon is a swell of song. A song
storming across time. Time crossing through the body of every child:
Whales are older than oceans and breach death itself.
We know this because a whale is returning our arms.
Our bodies remember. Our bodies
are everything. Our bodies are nothing.
The ocean is a collection of lost arms
cradling what cannot be carried.
Our bodies remember. Our bodies
are everything. Our bodies are nothing.
The first ocean swam through
a scar on the body of a whale.
The last star will fall into the
ocean and you will see us.
We are the ocean
chambering a whale. Blue
is a primary shade of time. Blue
is a blood deep pulse to the heart. Blue
is the distance between scar and fossil. Blue
is the question we have of you.
If the body is a wave of memory
what happens when the body is forgotten?
We see our bodies piled on the shore
into shapes of loneliness. Hear
our stomachs hungering still.
A great silence is falling
from the sky louder than birds
singing and whales diving for
dawn. We are being torn limb
from limb. Collect our arms
and float them from the river
to the sea. Forget everything
you know about air and water
meeting on the horizon. Our
arms are a whale-sung horizon.
The distance between our arms
and bodies is crashing ashore.
A vibration building into memory
so blue your bodies remember.
Our bodies are everything.
Our bodies are nothing but
moon spun waters churning
for shore. We are the sound
before the words mother and
father. There is a whale.
Our bodies remember.
Our bodies are everything.
Our bodies are nothing
without sapphire light
pooling into animal.
Pushing night into day
our bodies remember
our bodies are everything
our bodies are nothing
but life and death slipping
into song carried by a whale,
each song returning our arms
through the memory of water.
Our bodies remember.
Our bodies are everything.
Our bodies are nothing but an arm
reaching through our deaths to grab our future.
You are not dreaming.
Swim.
Jesse Sorrell writes to listen between physical and subtle form. He offers spiritual care in community-based, pediatric hospice & palliative care, bereavement, and other therapeutic settings. He lives surrounded by trees and animals in Chapel Hill, NC and is often found in water. His writing is thrilled to make home in KHÔRA.
Sorcha McNamara works as a painter, or more accurately as a maker of things. But even ‘maker’ isn’t really the right word. It’s too organic, too suggestive of the handmade, or the nobility of a craft. Instead, she is more of a conductor, a composer — the person in front of the orchestra waving their arms about, whose function and purpose you may question, but you know they are important for the stability of the whole piece.
Based in the West of Ireland, Sorcha holds an MA in Art + Research Collaboration from Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology (2024), and a BA in Painting from Limerick School of Art & Design (2019). Her works have been exhibited in Ireland and internationally, in Tokyo, Lisbon and London. She has previously been selected for residencies at Totaldobze Art Centre, Riga (supported by Ormston House, Limerick and the Artist-Run Network Europe project, 2022); JOYA AiR, Almeria (2022); Tangent Projects, Barcelona (2021); and PADA Studios, Lisbon (2020). Her practice is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.