Regarding the speech of water, Gaston Bachelard insists that

“the voices of water are hardly metaphoric at all; that the language of the waters is a direct poetic reality; that streams and rivers provide the sound for mute country landscapes, and do it with a strange fidelity; that murmuring waters teach birds and men to sing, speak, recount; and that there is, in short, a continuity between the speech of water and the speech of man. Conversely… human language has a liquid quality, a flow in its overall effect, water in its consonants… [And] this liquidity causes a special psychic excitement that, in itself, evokes images of water. Thus water will appear to us as a complete being with body, soul, and voice. Perhaps more than any other element, water is a complete poetic reality. A poetics of water, despite the variety of ways in which it is presented to our eyes, is bound to have unity.”

— Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 15

“Let the waters settle and you will see the moon and the stars mirrored in your own being.”

∆ Rumi

She knew vessels, she knew water, she knew mortal thirst.

"You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally, the river floods these places. 'Floods' is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding: it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory--what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our flooding."

Toni Morrison, 1986