Classic Poem

All water is dusk, or light blenched. A mauve shade,
some water is so large it fills up the lens,
becoming mere thought occurring here or there
as if in a place which was chosen for it,
on a surface, in a container, inside an edge.

Close-up, green bars of water greet an eye blinking
as it turns transparent, partial, on moving skin.
Here a body lunges on, diminishing, in shocks.
Some water is a mask, the cover of a cave
which has no walls and which flows, unawares,

round points, indentations, grooves, visages.
Surfacing faces look out like people in a car
which has braked, swinging round, in a crash.
Other are caught wading, motionless like stilts,
while a lozenge shaped launch lifts in swayed water.

But the water is silent, browsing on itself:
only its frontiers are audible events,
as in weed-suck and rock’s knife-cuts,
with a mechanism of hands and arms heaving
through it to striped buoys at eye-level.

One side you find dark patches, a house’s old mirrors,
tarnished by salt wind. Midway, a white post soars —
the water swells past it, glistening, breathing,
as expectantly as a birthday child at table.
Further on, elbows flash from one blue ridge to the next.

For what is it here which moves to bright to see,
like a gang of rosellas, plummeting from a branch
into wispy, mud-cracked stubble? What moves in multiples,
consistent, winged, making involuntary
structures out of scattered, minimal beats?

It is water. Water under dryness. A plain of light,
now a series of retreating fringes,
or flanges perhaps, like a cloth held over a fire
which burns through at several points
and thus reshapes itself. First a net,

(the swimmer pulls himself through its white flame) ,
then a kind of membrane folding back and up
which twists out new slops, connected hill sides,
of itself: dazzled ocean floods the mind’s tombs,
linking them like shots framed in sleep. —

It’s a dream sped up to unseeable quickness.
It’s the kind of dream which a sleeper wakes from
recalling only a tone, or the muffled flight
of a thing, not the scene or the face’s meaning —
whatever words there were slip by like a forward

darting glance-wise to the touch. You focus again:
sea-lion clouds peer up over a ragged ledge,
part of a cliff line which has no time for colour.
The place is now mandala, now perhaps montage,
where a bed explodes in its cauldron of ripples,

themselves suggesting a fish’s back sliding under,
or a shoulder curving through sculpted cups,
or water becoming dusk, or light blenched.