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Helen Ivory’s “How to make a pot of tea” intrigues and continues to intrigue, though halfway through my first reading I thought I saw it settling into a well-worn channel. When I reached the third stanza—

Time passes. You have a new job,
have taken up different hobbies,
have learned to burn sea-coal to warm yourself.

—I thought, “This is all very well-written, but it’s just going to end up being about entering an unfamiliar world and coming back (after being a totally different person) with a wee smidge of wisdom so that you have a new perspective on and appreciation for the perfectly ordinary things you’ve always done in life. It’s an easy and utterly predictable take on an archetypal story Joseph Campbell identified and is worthy of most mocked of sitcoms.”

Only that’s not what happens. The tea never gets made let alone appreciated (or maybe it does, but we’re not shown that, so it’s not important). Instead, we’re left with “a puddle of water on the kitchen floor” and an overflowing tap and a kettle that may or may not have been placed on the hob after being filled.

What we have then is an instruction poem that does not lead to its stated goal and thus points out the myriad ways in which instructions show more than just how to get to point z. Instructions (when they work) show the assumptions that giver and receiver share about what needs to be explained and what goes without saying as well as what materials are available. These are determined by culture and other factors. The various processes by which one can make tea are a good example: matcha isn’t made using Lipton teabags.

But what continues to intrigue me is the identity of the object that calls one back to the world in which tea is made:

Then you find the syringe
in the pocket of your old coat. It’s filled with air
that wants to bubble into your veins.

The bubbling air echoes the bubbles fish let rise to the surface and indicate the human need for air that has presumably been denied while pretending one was “brought up in a family of part-fish”. On the other hand, if the syringe were used to directly push the air into one’s veins, the results would be deadly. It is at once a memento mori and a memento vitae and it is precisely because of its both/and nature that it is able to catalyze a return to the ordinary world as well as the turning of that world into a watery one.

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