On Ai Weiwei’s “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn”

Fish live in water and drink it

presumably. I am putting a mug of

water to my lips to take

into mouth; push back with tongue;

pass mouthful to the banded muscles

of esophagus carrying it down

like a seduction; what

does water taste like other than water

or watery-ness; the complete closure

of its descriptive circuit is

something existing in

its parallel universe; its own complete

circle contains time, character, plot;

the snow globe of a parallel line touching

mine only in infinite distance,

like someone once asking me if  I knew

another man also in my circle

what circle—It took me time to understand

that this other man and I were the same

demographic; from a distance,

we had to know each other, or even,

we were the same, a circle shortened to a dot;

how absurd; now I know

my convergence with my parents’

land only appears so from the infinite distance

of the everybody in the street, of my name

on a bill, a screen, my ignorance; I know

                                   here on this ledge

I need feel no responsibility for

those re-

education camps existing in their separate stanza

in the news; distance has made them converge

to the water in my mouth, pushed back into

the throat, taking up flexible dimensions

in my elevator esophagus carrying it

down; it is like (I think) a man descending a mine shaft,

like a low-frequency sound spreading

inside my chest—

the sense of  swallowing liquid is a perception;

on the other hand, the man descending

is only an association with the peristaltic

waves lapping into the chest—

water’s taste is a perception, is water

carrying something (almost, or half-

becoming, something else entirely);

what do you call it when it carries

particles intrinsicate, like

polities inside, maybe a province

within a nation

                                 maybe a colloid,

particles larger than ions but as small

compared to a clay particle, squinted

on the edge of humanly visible,

as a human’s height is to a typical mine shaft;

like fat globules in milk, they will not—

they do not settle and are not liquid

and deny transparency to light

(it is called the Tyndall effect)

as one emotion in another,

grief or anger in love, permits but

alters what lights it, will not dissolve,

is carried as the man carries the earth-

enware urn in the photograph of him

dropping it to shatter—

A metaphor is a colloid. The water

in the urn (imagined from the shadow

that is there) carries it as a river,

carries the sediments of a river,

the flocculence of still-living creatures,

the extinct creatures of dolphins

and paddlefish

to lay down at the mouth, tongue

thrust into the sea and into my mouth,

opening up the alimentary shaft at

its back; but there are things that do not dissolve

do not fragment do not belong in that

continuous phase and cannot be carried: a swallow

                                               (feathered, singing)

of water enters me, as the grief-stricken singing

person enters the mine

to sing inside the darkness—

the darkness thick as water, that seems to

dart on its own accord into the back of my mouth,

although I know I am pushing it

there; the man in the simile, like Homer

likening Odysseus’s weeping to a widow

who beats her face while her

husband’s killers beat her with weapons,

not to kill her, but to beat her;

in the chain-linked desert enclosure, a man

enters a room where a woman is chained;

the past and the future are parallel lines

both as inaccessible as a simile;

the water in my mouth tastes, as usual,

of nothing; how can it be so neutral, having carried

so much everything with it; but it tastes only of water,

speaks nothing, carries itself, essence

that enters, downward rush; somewhere,

a snowcock drops from its ledge and shrieks

at ranges and snow-capped deserts; the singer

descends the mine to make a body only like

the living into the living; someone is asking

to fix the broken machine of  the human—