(after Eugene’s Falls, by A Frances Johnson)

inside the invisible atlas of a wave
possessor of savage kindness          two-tenths of the way
the rock wall of self                            splits the unbound gaze
into a spume           of wonder	         the terror and fascination
a pencilled hand stencilling in lead
the intricacy of water	         that immutable
breadth and depth approaching the very whatness of things

grown obdurate                    skin-cells stretched
in vague permutations of sky
the sideways lurch of the mind     that can never
know itself	             that beguiling
illusion of cognition                           that atomised
density of world
who can breathe	             grown thin and stretched

on the breath of forgetting
what once                you will never scale
that rock face of wall                          the nature
of nature 	        grown impossibly 	      immense
no scale can map	             the implausible plosives
of a future city		         scant as cloth
fungal-flowered mildewed mosquito-mangy

progressively receding      the impression of distance
a mirage	                 a horizon
managed best 	             when drawn
    	   with dynamite
that alluvial blast of time    reductive
as recompense       the doubting
earth	                 denied