Delta

Months have passed, each one filled with foreboding and silence. Now disasters are flowing together into a delta that has no name, and will only be given one by geographers, who will come later, much later.

—John Berger

Many years on the water, manygenerations.Something more massive than amood, waking

in the wake of a dream. He makesthe shore of day,leaves a net of light lying in hisshallows, lymph.

Gets up. Getting hot. His muds, hispharaonicplovers. Snow he can only imagine,but falling.

Daughters are half water. Long afterdark, waterpasses in their eyes. He works forDelta Soda.

Pride is the man set up on hisbicycle, to work,pedaling out of the dream in acontrolled fall

forward into the reeds, gasping at thecatchingof the light. Birds, their handbellsthere.

So should snow fall on these oldestdiligences,the husbandry of mud, the drowningbells. Afar,

old words are tweezered, and theannual cloudguts itself on the Ruwenzori. Intooncoming cotton

he pushes, under a black Rosettaslab. No dreamshould confuse his bones with theheat of bicycle

steel, but birds knuckle the spokesnow, and his girls’eyes have whitened and desisted. Heputs out a hand,

as a man landing a boat puts out ahand, but he can’toutreach the unfathomable winter ofthe dream;

his daughters’ eyes thaw with tears,birds goto ground, and the river is turningsoda at his touch.