does nothing, changes everything
my words fall through a gully
plunge straight
as Wallaman Falls
splash deep shadowed ponds
to get your attention
yours dabble through a plain
by a river delta, the braids
of your thoughts spread wide
collecting in puddles
that evaporate
before they find the sea
my words plunge
through rock fissures
only speleologists might find
infuse for eons
with minerals and gas
yours recondense
as rain
this is not
about Ragnar, or shot
in blue celluloid (max hyperised gore)
woad doesn’t come into it
or Yorkshire graveyards / horizontal corpses
an invocation sung in Kernewek
for fishermen, misses
its point (Poseidon’s prong drips blood /
widows weep salt in paintings)
it’s not
the dirge of left-hand piano drills
(Volga’s men rolling over
calloused palms, roll over)
this is
driven song / bitumen river
solitary immigrant HOG
lantern skew / gust slap / siren eucalypt
keening for 382 fissured kilometres
1800cc / vertical
unriven
As I board, the driver
asks for my passport
like he already knows
we will travel to another country.
Along straight highways
lakes shimmer under power lines.
Silver birches shake yellow leaves.
Dark clouds come with rain.
Beside me a young man reads
Learning Vietnamese in Finnish.
For a change of mood he keeps
Naomi Klein, steady on his lap.
I open the Kalevala (in English)
to read of other journeys here;
older ways of seeing this land.
And learn, in repetitions of three
in case you didn’t get it the first
or the second time around, there’s
a mortal cost to not saying out loud
the name of the thing that you want.
