Footnotes for an Essay on Submersion
by Carolyn Oliver
Footnotes for an Essay on Submersion
1.
To submerge is always to reckon with embodiment.
2.
In tamed water—e.g., the bathtub, enamel peeled away (eaten), revealing green—we find disembodiment. Removal from the body.
3.
By body I mean an object to be studied, draped, cleansed, consumed, targeted, timed.
4.
Sometimes by the possessor of the body.
5.
By removal I mean exquisite, uncomfortable awareness of the body caused by isolation in an unaccustomed medium.
6.
Or, presence shaped by absence.
7.
Disembodiment is not the water’s offering.
8.
It is a consequence of the water’s taming, its seclusion from wild space.
9.
Submerged in tamed water, one can be happened upon.
10.
See also: man, lurking.
11.
Time runs out. Stillness is required. Silence is almost.
12.
Tamed water says: Lift yourself up. Go on. Prove you belong.
13.
Asks: How could your body deserve this?
14.
In wild water—e.g., a cold bay reached by rocks slicked with algae—we find unembodiment.
15.
Or, dissolution: there was never any body.
16.
(Not in the way culture makes a body. Incorporates a body.)
17.
One becomes pure receiver for alien signals, the sounds of another world.
18.
By receiver I mean vessel: ship (one who passes over) and container (one who holds).
19.
Consider the dawn chorus of the fish.
20.
Also the tide carrying the dead fish to shore.
21.
In wild water, the one unembodied is simultaneously timeless and temporary.
22.
Submerged in wild water, one can be happened upon.
23.
See also: teeth; spines; stings; current.
24.
Wild water invites flesh, loves fat, makes life.
25.
Asks: How did you stray so far from home?
26.
Remembering the limit of submersion is breath. Return is likely.
27.
Forgoing at the time of this writing all discussion of burial and initiation and birth.
Carolyn Oliver is the author of Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, forthcoming 2022), selected by Matthew Olzmann for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize. Carolyn’s poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, Radar Poetry, Shenandoah, Beloit Poetry Journal, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, Cherry Tree, Plume, DIALOGIST, and elsewhere. Carolyn is the winner of the E. E. Cummings Prize from the NEPC, the Goldstein Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, and the Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry. Carolyn lives in Massachusetts with her family. Online: carolynoliver.net.