In the past weeks i've taken to the bath with an increasing urgency. I have begun daydreaming of it at work... the nearing moment when i can draw hot water, shed my clothes, and grab a book. I don't remember such a feverish desire for submersion since i was young, pushing yellow ducks across the surface or watching as technicolor sponges wax into dinosaur shapes (remember those? fucking amazing shit...).
It's the release of breath as i inch my body beneath the surface. The water drawn to redden the skin, almost burn. And then feet up and hearing that hollow ring of surrounding tile and lately the faint murmur of Dvořák's piano trios from the other room (my chosen bathing music~ highly recommended).
In the bath i realize so many things about myself. For one, i'm incredibly tall... how far away my feet are! And skin still tanned from a season or two ago, in the tall ponderosa pines of Idaho. The smooth hairless patches above my knees where my pants have worn the skin, from legs pumping like pistons aboard my bike. That my voice can do amazing things in this private studio of watery reverbration and human echolocation. Or how easy it is to turn everything off, i mean every goddamned voice that jaws throughout the day... they have no place in the bath.
And then i've had enough silence and i let the voices in... thinking of Gary Snyder's The Bath, and discarding that i hum the very best bath song ever written, perhaps ever sung. Bilbo Baggin's Bath Song:
Sing hey! for the bath at close of day
that washes the weary mud away!
A loon is he that will not sing:
O! Water Hot is a noble thing!
O! Sweet is the sound of falling rain,
and the brook that leaps from hill to plain;
but better than rain or rippling streams,
is Water Hot that smokes and steams.
O! Water cold we may pour at need
down a thirsty throat, and be glad indeed;
but better is Beer, if drink we lack
and Water Hot poured down the back.
O! Water is fair that leaps on high
in a fountain beneath the sky;
but never did fountain sound so sweet
as splashing Hot Water with my feet!
Amen brother... i feel ya.
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