SEDIMENT 

 

Lately the notices had begun to lie    Under overpasses    Like the rotten windfall of public trees  

The city’s hygiene personnel having been deployed elsewhere.   The dust, skin fine   

that followed, slowed   The gyre of my daffodil hubcaps   Dried the rubber windlaces of tinted panes   

on cooped up cars around the neighbourhood.   Rotundas of cypress, carob, campaigns –  

I noted the red of the roundabout earth.   With the passing of each anticipated rain, 

I’d slowly learned how not to see the flyers    Grey faces of the disappeared    The grainy ink 

that masked their cheeks.    I was loading the pulp into buckets before long.    

Now I bring a shovel.   Easier to bury numbers, names, in orchards.    And in this way to bury 

is to live   With the massing paper and outcomes   Like dough   Wet clay    

In the pit of a cold stomach.   Their issue is routine, heavy    The roads weak    For all 

my precautionary measures.   Recognising that it is indeed a face I see   Swimming in a rill 

that runs into an open drain    Like the clotted flower of a lilypad in Xochimilco    I say, 

If ever there’s a day to swim the face of crowds it’s this   Wiping the cartridge ink and ketchup   

From the web between my fingers in a Sanborn’s WC, before  Tipping generously, loafing out    

In search of boundary stones   A poultice of tar    An injection of cement    

For this lime stream of reticence    Leaking into our municipal

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                                                                                                       MAGMA ISSUE 81 'ANTHROPOCENE'