Like all things, it begins as water and ends as water
As water, it may become vapor, steam droplets on a window, a heaviness in the air we bring into our lungs
It may become dew or dog piss in the grass, a body’s nourishment or excreta
Residue from the time when it once had a body
From a time when we too had bodies, embodiments of the air we breathed
When we were ourselves bodies, when we would breathe in one another’s company, could feel that warmth and take it within ourselves, as though it were ours to own
As though we’d become the vapor ourselves, and the world as vaporous
As this empty park, fogged in November
As the gray smoke of an animal at stride, which itself was a body at the edge of shadow
The body of smoke streaking the abandoned ballpark
A creature of smoke, creature from creare, a thing created
A residue of creation gliding the field, parting reality as it went
And we were also that smoke, my dog and me, witnessing a promise dragged in the creature’s wake
It moved as though inevitable, as though a piece of one dark had broken off to join another
And somewhere along the treeline, we joined that darkness with it, our consciousness like a mist that trailed in its wake, trailed from our minds as though outside of ourselves
As though these fields slathered in dew and the piss of dogs had condensed into a fog that we then breathed in, the creature, my dog, and myself
This fog even the streetlights struggled to pierce, which joined with the heat in our lungs as we exhaled
And became a lonesomeness overtaking us all, and the more alone we became the more we steamed outward
As this ice might steam in its tray with the freezer door open
And isn’t this city in November an ice about to form?
Doesn’t it all go back to zero in the end, as all things must?
Born in the tray, the ice comes to rest in the glass
This very glass with the gin and the lime wedge, this glass that I held twenty years ago when the future felt like a promise, motherless but possible
Which has become instead this year of pestilence, of the late night YouTube videos
Newly christened freighters sliding off their blocks, crashing heavily off blocks into the shipbuilders’ canal
Which I’ll always consider a kind of birth, all that tremor and fulfillment
All that welded steel bobbing in the channel, perfect gibbous of water breaking over the banks
Because even an ice cube once had a mother, once cradled in the protection of the tray
Just as I, twice unmothered, was once a body grown in another’s
Immersed in the waters produced by a body, a little condensation of cells and potential
Now drinking to forget, or drinking to encounter a version of the self
As a smoke drifting a treeline, as a fleeting streak in the night
Which will come to stillness at some point, either violently or in peace, either witnessed or unseen
And release its waters once more into the vast, rippling pelt of the earth
