On the Banks of Acheron

What is the sound of waiting for Charon?
It's the silence of granite,
the nothing of worm-casks,
alluvial whispers,
tinnitus whistle,
hearing-aid feedback;
your cochlea struck like timpani
by a regrettable memory;
your mind's song played backwards
through industrial speakers;
demented scratching
of cocaine-fuelled cardiographs
across all of which, first distant,
then sure, the plash of his bone-oar
sweeping through water.

What did you see from that shore?
I saw waters like coal-tar
dank on the bedding grit,
boiling alembics of river-rock alchemy;
mists shaped like stillborns,
like gibbets,
like scorpions.

Did you smell him first? Yes.
Was it musk-fox or wolf-breath? Neither.
Is he death-cold or fever-hot? Both.

With what did you pay him?
With everything.

Closed Systems

The night wears stars; he wears his shirt
unbuttoned. Badgers amble across floodplains

towards him. Now, a thin tranche of moon,
partial and blotted: a strange time

for divining. He is transplanting water —
stream to river to estuary —

in a teacup and an unbroken line
from the east to the west coast; but,

stooping to the river he sometimes stops,
cognisant, perhaps, of madness in his method,

or his father's ghost swimming the cold water.
When thunder rends sky he recalls

the rising water-table of his childhood;
raindrops collecting in teacups placed

for that purpose on the back doorstep;
always something upsetting his fieldwork.

Drought

Dirt-storm dust, light as conscience,
puffed up by wind-gusts,
by footfalls, by combines —

ghost of Earth; Id of alluvium.
Fast in the knap of a best suede jacket,
billowing from backslaps:

ingratiating itself;
lingering in crevices;
insisting on an appointment.

Dust nourishing nothing,
swarming lightly through Summer,
its porch-steps and orange-groves;

expanding its Empire of Nil
among wheatrows, in gutters, in pithcraters.
Rain is either hearsay or heresy.