He walks on water with long, tensile legs skates the surface of this element leaving no ripple, no distorted clarity never breaking the surface tension quite at home in the sky mirrored under him.
He is no philosopher though you might think him one where he moves like an artist’s eyelash delicate as a thought, a contact point a synapsis between water and sky.
The thought he embodies cannot be translated into language only experienced in the languorous stroke through oils in the sky laying itself upon water.
From the side he is Fred Astaire dancing on a mirror making it look like air, as if air and gravity never wed— debonair, a gentleman of equilibrious smile.
In the green and flittering shallows a watery prism, he wavers over the many-colored shadows, a kaleidoscope turning the world in a dance his shadow revolving like a zodiac on the sand beneath all suspended in the clear element.
He writes one word over and over though no one will read it before it vanishes: so clear, it is transparent, his tele tele that leaves the thing itself before you think of it as that before it is that and not this.
Though he writes his word over and over he leaves no mark, not even a line like skywriting to hang in the air an instant. Now in the moment of his stroke are color and shape a pattern light flashes around, a point that vanishes and appears to vanish again.
“Water Strider” is reprinted by permission from The Waters Under the Earth (Canon Press), ©2005 by Robert Siegel. He is the author most recently of The Waters Under the Earth and A Pentecost of Finches: New and Selected Poems (Paraclete Press).
Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
