Africa North 3.
i.
Water runs on marble, nakedness revealed, nakedness concealed form water words, water memories, mists & fates:
veins wrestle the marble into mangled knots, blemished pearls on an implacable skin, shards leaving fragmentary traces of empty spaces awaiting faces.
(ii.)
Lights dance in the night, picturesque “casas blancas del pueblo” appear through the darkness, as the brush strokes of my mind steal the action of the shadow:
life is the illusion of a dream, the watchful shadow reproaches.
(iii.)
Mists cordon the mountain tops that will guerdon the deluge with crowns like wreathes, ancient fields in silent colours surrounded by the burgeoning new lead to the hidden valley below:
old women of the valley, old as aglow, so slow they go, yet still poised aloof in a world untouchable, yet trapped.
(iv.)
Daughters of necessity naked in the rock unleashed in white trefoil in the marsh swamp of night rain, stark where epochs sleep in their shadows:
replication of memories where the old becomes the new & a world splits in two with Morpheus in the breach.
(v.)
Treachery can remain on even the most benign plains, high in kiln firelight they cowl night’s shade & oversee goats on the hill & below:
now we are found phantoms at her Carnivalesque, let us toast our host, O phantom Sphinx, we are found honoured guests at her feast in Paradise.
(vi.)
Beyond control beyond reach the erratic butterfly flits bloom to bloom, the intrepid stalker with net both captured in the mimic mould:
a knot is tied, a knot that both wrestles with & embraces its duality, that ravels birth & unravels death & binds its existence.
