Читать книгу Door in the Mountain - Jean Valentine - Страница 88

Lines in Dejection

for my sister

Remember how we spread our hair on the sea,

Phosphorous fans, the moon's edge crumbling under

Moving pieces of sky? Ghostly weeds loitered

Like misty Thetis's hair, or some sea-monster's

Ancient whiskers, floating around our knees;

Moony children, we drifted, and no god or monster

Could have seemed foreign then to our globe of water.

Remember

Lying like still shells on the glass water?

The paper moon opened, a Japanese water flower

Drifting free of its shell in the bowl of the sky.

Who poured it out? In twenty years

The bay is still in its place, they are still there,

Walking slowly by the water.

Have they been here, all along? Have we?

Back, back, I strike out from the ancestral stare

And now the bowl's shadow composes what I see:

The weeds cradle me and draw me under, under.

But there they are, on the pitch-black ocean floor,

Hands out, hair floating: everywhere!

Holding us in their charred arms like water.