Water

So I have studied streams , how they run along a field's edge and turn, to be joined, at a field's corner, by another; and how this runs on and itself, at the field's end, pours over a bank and falls into a wider stream swirling on to be joined, and then to join many more such streams converging towards a river.

Fields can be mapped like skin, its arteries feeding veins, then capillaries - thin threads of life blood infusing tissues, barely registering the throb of a pulse but streaming to the edges of fanned-out fingers and toes, a tongue and other intimate places, taking and paying tribute to the main body, diverging from the heart's spring.

Rivers that run, run from small streams, so it seems, not like the circulation of a body? But seeming conceals the flow of water through the land : vapour from water to air as clouds gather from river, stream, wet soil, the whiteness they wash from the ground below, the dark hue they adopt as they thicken to looseness.

The barometer falls, air pressure ceases to hold, water leaks out of cloud, out of air, vapour condenses to liquid and falls to the ground, Earth's bloodstream through the atmosphere, soaks to soil transnuding through each particle of sand and loam, running off clay into streams that well up from springs pulsing from deep below rock , through soil into the open air.