Blackwater

We scattered the dust of you at the edge of the world

where water meets earth and sky,

as though we were releasing your tight ball of spirit

into the elements, as though we were returning you,

as though that could ever compensate

for what was taken from you,

as though you could ever, start again.

We walked here, once, when you could.

We talked until the heavy words of fact and experience

ran out and pure, colourless words of ourselves

flowed instead, words we had never known were there.

I see you still, in your cheesecloth shirt and denim skirt,

your hair a cloud of gold, your eyes bright

with a future that would never come.

It is a place of bleak beauty, salt, like blood,

corrugated fields unravel into fringes of marsh,

then on and on, ridges softening into shifting mud flats,

soft lips of the mouth of this careless river,

pouring the life of itself into the ungrateful sea.

A mouth that might tell of many things,

of long boats and battles and holy men and you.

Present becomes past, sliding peacefully into

gentle, earthy shades of copper, moss and clay,

sediment colours the river not black, but brown.

Lives, sunk deep into mud, or carried away,

particle by particle, out to sea,

travelling, slipping

away.