undercurrent
undercurrent
rita wong
with drawings by cindy mochizuki
2015
Copyright © Rita Wong, 2015
all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, [email protected].
Nightwood Editions
P.O. Box 1779, Gibsons, BC, V0N 1V0, Canada
typesetting & cover design: Carleton Wilson
cover art: Marika Swan • interior drawings: Cindy Mochizuki
Nightwood Editions acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publisher’s Tax Credit.
This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled, ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free and printed with vegetable-based dyes.
Printed and bound in Canada.
library and archives canada cataloguing in publication
Wong, Rita, 1968-, author
Undercurrent / Rita Wong ; with drawings by Cindy Mochizuki.
Poems.
“A blewointment book”.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-88971-308-6 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-0-88971-045-0 (pdf)
I. Title.
PS8595.O5975U54 2015 C811’.54 C2015-901130-2
C2015-901131-0
“We do not own the water. The water owns itself.”
– Lee Maracle
The water belongs to itself.
“Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. That water can flow, or it can crash. Be water my friend.”
– Bruce Lee
我
很
感
謝
這
裡
的
原
住
民
–黃錦兒
pacific flow
water has a syntax i am still learning
a middle voice pivots where it is porous
foraminifera punctuate ocean floors
salmon streams double as human & bear lifelines
an underlying platform marine reclaims its own
from trough to crest hypersea rolls through meme
tidal rhythm sings convoluta roscoffensis
silica circuits iodine invokes thyroid
saltiness grows over eons plankton provide half our oxygen
what we cannot see matters as kin
fever speeds us up churns soluble toxins, insoluble plastics
strikes gulls spikes trawls
choppy waves warn hazardous passages
abound from city sewage
mess amasses dissonant grammar
wail overfished bluefins tune
benthic beholds watches & weights
learning curves gurgles to the surface
borrowed waters: the sea around us, the sea within us
the great pacific garbage patch is not just a mass of floating plastic junk the size of ontario, jostling about with jellyfish and starving squids in the ocean, but a dead albatross mirrors us back to ourselves. it is a manmade network, toxic magic in the making, branching into your bathroom with its plastic shampoo bottles & toothbrushes, into local plastic factories, into the fast food restaurants that sing the convenient song & inconvenient truth of disposable forks & styrofoam containers, into the plastic beverage bottles belched out by nestle, coca-cola, pepsi, visible tip of the corporate iceberg. it is embedded in mutual funds & stock investments. it is soap dish & lawn chair, eyeglasses & twist ties, hospital food trays & squeezable honey bottles, lighters & lipstick tubes, all bobbing & decomposing in a great big salty home. it is formidable & humble, far away & intimate, outside & inside, all at once.
both the ferned & the furry, the herbaceous & the human, can call the ocean our ancestor. our blood plasma sings the composition of seawater. roughly half a billion years ago, ocean reshaped some of its currents into fungi, flora & fauna that left their marine homes & learned to exchange bodily fluids on land. spreading like succulents & stinging nettles, our salty-wet bodies refilled their fluids through an eating that is also always drinking. hypersea is a story of how we rearrange our oceanic selves on land. we are liquid matrix, streaming & recombining through ingesting one another, as a child swallows a juicy plum, as a beaver chews on tree, as a hare inhales a patch of moist, dewy clover. what do we return to the ocean that let us loose on land? we are animals moving extracted
