Water Quality

I find my bearings by clouds of moon jellies / afloat beneath my anchored boat, / pulsing the seas bright night, / their milky way, unfurling. In these lush and vivid poems water gloves a swimmers body, is satin, yes, viscous. Albumen, vernix, newborn slick. It rinses gai lan bright green in a silver bowl in Hong Kong or hibernates in the Pacific Northwest under a silky pelt / of rain. People-less. Days, months of this / hiss, softness breaking cliffs. Cynthia Woodman Kerkham ponders the urgent question, What does water want? Whether as the body of a beloved lake, where people wrestle with the concerns of stewardship, or as the sea in which to sail and drift, or as a gene pool simmering through a familys veins, water is the main character here. It can be turbid, the amniotic colour of spittle, or, in a time of drought, brilliant beads. As a stream flushed over granite, water seems to want so little it shares anothers colour, yet here, it gets our full and necessary attention. Rich with vibrant language and intensity, these poems sizzle in lyric form, monologues, elegy, and haibun. Water Quality calls on us to consider that our very survival is at stake unless we make a vow to this vital element to cherish it as we would a partner.