to the contents page.)
A description of cedars is familiar,
evokes a swollen scrap of scarred remembrance.
This is a twisted vision of landscape,
the trees only part of a shimmer
that obscures even the swirling summer
dust, even the horizon goes,
becomes a vaguer boundary.
Because there is an outlet,
belching clouds of swiftly dissipating
smoke - because of this he
builds a dam across the river far below,
storing quantities of latent power
that shimmers in a vast and shining
sheet of liquid mirror, covering
the huts and fields of thousands
of his people.
In the mirror hangs a fish, grown
smaller in the flooding -
in its former river it had been
the terror of the village children.
He sees it laze below the surface,
sunlight on its rows of scales,
its gently rippling fins.
He sees his face reflected in the water's
silver, fleshy now, and scummed with algae.
A flash of violent blue, a kingfisher
darts silent in the corner of his eye,
there where the vessels trace a
cat's-cradle of blood.
And, after centuries, the land lies
marshy and unhealthy; he recognises
(just) his features in the swarms of black
mosquitoes, in the snakes that coil on
tree-stumps, in the deaths from
bites, disease, from loss of bearings
in the false solidity, slow suckings
of the unseen depths. He sees his
face, recoils; resumes.
( to the contents page.)