I entered. I won. Crazy, crazy judges. This is the poem.

Notes to self re: world water day poem

– put in something on the history of fountains
– something on chemistry, how hard it is to fathom atoms,
protons, neutrons, let alone compounds, valencies, two
hydrogen and one oxygen
– something about drinking two hydrogen one oxygen,
6 beer
– something on eyeballs,
how they dry out
– something on eyeball first aid: dixie cups, tape
– something on saliva
– something on thirst
– something on the average volume of the average toilet tank,
and that time the pipes burst at that cottage I rented and
I filled the tank with Nalgene bottles of spring run-off
– something about gravity
– something about tides
swells, the Dead Sea, the Great Lakes, the
Aral Sea all dust now
– something on heavy metals in the lungs
– something about coffee
– something about decaffination
– something on bottled water
the Coca-Cola company, how I don’t ever want to pay them for water in my life
– something on taps –
actually a lot on taps:
on/off on/off on/off on/off on/off
and other things too like kinds of taps, spiggots, self-closing taps,
timers for taps, taps the song (dunh da-nuh/ dunh-na-na), taps
for water
– something on giardia, or no, cholera
– something on rust
– something on babies
– something on the movie “Chinatown”
– something on the 3 Gorges dam, the Grand Coulee dam,
the Revelstoke dam
– something about kokanee
– more on the Aral Sea
– something on sloughs
– something on tarns
– something on oxbows
– something on Smetana’s the Moldau
– something on fens, bogs, marshes, swamps
– something on ducks
– something on the water table, maybe
– something on waterbeds
– something on gutters
– something on ice
– something on how when we were thirsty we used to tip our paddles up and drink from
them, put our lips next to the blade and let lakewater run into our mouths
– something on how sweet it was, Ontario lake water, like
maple sap dripping from spiggots, just exactly
that sweet