Bitter Water Opera by Nicolette Polek

Author:Nicolette Polek [Polek, Nicolette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

I was leaving the nursery when I heard a faint collection of voices. I climbed up the hill with my red wagon, following the sounds, until I reached an old Congregational church. The pear tree inspired some sort of valiance in me, proving some capability, so when I experienced a curiosity toward the chapel and the music, my body unthinkingly carried me forward—the way one’s feet continuously navigate across a scramble of rocks—through the front doors. The tall, skinny windows were propped open with umbrellas and inside smelled like math textbooks. I slipped into a pew in the back with a woman who handed me a red book. I had left my wagon outside but brought in the pear sapling, and seated it on the pew beside me. All around, women and men sang a hymn that I thought I’d heard before, and out the windows hemlocks bent and swayed across the grove.

A man with large white hair sat in the pew in front of me; a green caterpillar inched across the back of his collar. At the end of the hymn he stood up and climbed the stairs to the pulpit. The chapel was so old that creaks shuttered across the floor like lightning.

In the beginning was the … he said. I relaxed, so over-familiar with the phrase that it inconsequentially floated past me.

I tried to remember the last time I was in church. Perhaps when I visited my mother, before moving across the country. There, in the old pew, my attention drifted as I looked out the window. When I turned back, the green caterpillar was creeping into the preacher’s hair.

Words don’t fall away and disappear, but form thought shapes, lead separate lives … blossom, or echo, clicking into meaning years later…

I touched my leg.

Revelation finds its time … The preacher’s hair looked stiffly bent. The things you say can either build and lift something up, or produce a rot—not only in those who hear, but in you too.

I imagined his words as small, buoyant pearls, cast from the front of the chapel and out the propped-open windows, into the town, over the house and the high wall, some falling and settling onto the ground, falling into open windows of parked cars outside the market or into the potted soil at the nursery, breathed in and carried on clothes, waiting to be encountered and revealed. I imagined all our words living out similar courses, so that we were moving through a misty network of word droplets, which changed in concentration and motivation depending on the proximity of certain people and ideas, and how easily the tide of language might be manipulated by propagating our tongues and hearts with goodness, by choosing to say and repeat it.

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