Saturday morning is full of runners and these words are full of water. Blue. Full of the slow stretch of sweat and swinging ponytails. Panting dogs being pulled along small lines of barges. And the canal breathing through it all. I must call it a canal or a body of water. Must write it as a river. This requires me, weaving past the crowds and the canines and the chewed up trainers, to condense its multiple currents into a singularity. And the time ticks on, and the clouds refuse to soften into my gaze or hands or ink. So both I and the sky hold this body, squinting into the mirror with its chest looking upwards. To hold its body, still glistening, still running, up to the sun.

The mud of the bank slides into the waters. As if turning outwards into the clear convex of a fishbowl. I continue observing the surface, its glass and everything beyond it. Continue looking at myself through the canal, distorted in the ritual of a bird bathing. And the leaf hesitates before leaving the twig. It bends its head lower with the wind. Each gentle movement a circle. I am not the only ripple here, nor the leaf, nor the bird. These circles start to slow. In a pretence to disappear, they continue into their own music downstream. Being caught by the bubbles of a barge or the flaking skin of polystyrene. It is all drunk into the rhythm of a river, where the story streams out into endless spools. The verb. The water. Myself. All continuing a running on.

It is something like not arriving and still knowing there is a going. That there is a being in this moving. And that the point is not somewhere, but everywhere. And that somewhere within it, the unsingular point runs into reaching this river. Trawls through the Irwell. The Mersey. A point where it winds like a serpent attempting to eat its own tail. I am in Prague or in Paris. Passing through the Guadalquivir in Seville. Paris or Venice. And all cities are river cities and all bodies are water. There is something light in this liquid, in the thought of it or the thing itself, which fills me up. The water of all these places amplify and condense into each other. This story is a story of the marine drinking its own home. A fish spilling its breath to eat it again. A man on the bank casting out a haiku:

fisherman would you

ever swim with your fish/ wish

fisherman, would you

and it sounds like a song. Polyphonic and tireless, bumping against the edge of the water’s bed. Seeming still in its pretence of rest. Still in its movement. Words trying to resist their nature and flow into the eternal. A breath which breaks prose. Which will die and be born and never be done. It is lyric in the tongue, its vibrations rolling on. The lyric is love. And it is this, which through everything else, pushes on. On along the river. Courses through. Like every rain through the sky, like every breath does. For the love which has run through these lines has changed from its beginning. I follow on along this line. It shimmers silver, like a spider’s web with an unclear end. There is a line I love and it is full of other voices. The sounds of the canal bank, dirtying wheels of a pram, a jogger’s feet following onto concrete. It is the eddying voice of everything beneath it. And the day turns towards the afternoon, and all the things I had wanted to say, having run away, make their way back into the water. Submerging all into a hollow for the duck to drink, or the hesitant leaf to skim. To sit and rest in this space. Shed its feathers or preen themselves. In this stillness— it is seeming— that a sort of god is pooling here. With the world collating like droplets of rain through long branches. Dipping into estuaries to stay and say something. Which sounds a lot like water, and circles. Or the mumbles of a washing machine. And here we are again. An isolated pond streaming into a river.

The fish eventually finds its channel for its wish. Through swimming through it. Going somewhere, towards the next minute, and then another. Waiting all the while and being exactly where it needs to be. There is a line that is carried, more silver. Slippier. Perhaps the mother was lost and the angelfish takes over, and the line is being followed further into a mouth. Of a cave. Of a river. I am trying to find something here. Before stillness becomes a sinkhole. Before it becomes an enlightened entry into another world. It is this cycle of stillness in which I must stay. In which I must wait. Pass my time with somebody else to pray too, before all these things soon go unnoticed and pass by on their own.

Though, eventually, and a long lifetime away from breakfast, the sun sets onto Bridgewater Canal.