The soul was shrunken, dumb,
sightless in a depth of cold.
Dead horizons dogged my feet,
crept closer;
hunched in upon my winter
thoughts,
humping a coracle of fog,
I slipped down through underwater
gloom
towards the still, dark stream.
Tawny grasses gathered,
brittle with their own endurance,
splinted with ice.
And then
on a curved black briar,
dipping to the water’s edge,
the whole world moved.
An atom of life
resurrected time,
A rust-red speck threw ice-bright
notes
high across the silence,
over and over,
startled the deep-drugged air,
set a million tiny suns winking
and dancing in the walls of mist;
he bobbed his head, flirted his
tail,
and was gone
in a shout of blue-light dazzle
between the honouring reeds,
swift down the dream-dark stream
to some hidden river of light.
I, too, made obeisance to the
kingfisher, passing,
or maybe to the hidden promise of the
fisher-king -
I guess it doesn’t matter which.
(February,
1992)
