A cloud’s shadow slid down the side
Of the mountain and onto the lake.
The darkened depths gave it a body.
A child treading water breathing in
A gulp gave it a voice. A father charging
Into the water gave it direction. A second
Of sun gone missing for all of us
Gave it witnesses. Nobody looked up
And saw the cloud, which never looked down.
A man wakes in a hotel room
In an unfamiliar time zone. He has all his memory
and yet he carries nothing with him from that time.
Like the new summer from the spring he is all effect and no cause.
Outside in the dark he walks as if on the floor of a great sea.
But the ground plants have sucked all the water from the place
And have taken on a strange bristly beauty as if floating upwards.
Opening his mouth to say a name the word dries on his tongue.
One hundred and eleven degrees: three above auspicious.
Of the river his lover grew up alongside and the low-tide’s waves
Of the bay he knew as a child he hears nothing. But he hears
a message as when a great wave has washed over you
And floating in the foam you find a scrawled message
from the past forecasting that a wave is about to crash.
The hotel swallows the moon like a horizon.
One lizard on a row of stones.
It starts as a line on a paper the size of a stamp
And eventually compiles detail and direction
Into trails, avenues, settlements, named places
Sometimes the choice is not the path
But the chasm around which edge we inch carefully
Our backs to some unclimbable stone
One day I woke and like a blanket on the bed
The map of my life, where distance is measured
In years not miles, had got so large I had to fold it
And the myth of depth closed in on itself,
Parts of my life decades apart touched as I kept
Folding it so it could be held in one hand
Or a pocket. Childhood friend, meet this latest
Version of me, these faint lines on so large a landscape.
Translations from the English 