Say slay, hieratic water killer, why don’t you?
his aeolian taunt from deep in the tamarisk
guides her to where he lies forgotten

The water priestess has no form and he, banished
from the temple since before its song-words
were written, no name

Enki’s children are dying in the city of a slow thirst
for the melody that was scorched from the land,
only the fluid core of the nameless one can save them

She glides over contours of his face seeking a way to enter
unaware that a foothold will turn her to stone,
that she might as well say slay

He, in the snarled thicket, watches as a demotic hole
opens him up, allows her level to impose
might he be the one to say slay?

 As blood drenches the land Enki’s children
will never know who it was said slay

 

Sometimes it happens
in a glance returned to tumbled
roof tiles earlier passed over, rain streaks
in an ochre-washed wall, or the snug
look of a paint box cushioned
among socks in the unpacking of a case

other times in the placing of feet
into cobblestone indents in search of yesterday’s
coffee bar where men stood sipping before the street
filled with vespas, and Charli the mutt lolled
for his lamb chop beside his ageing mistress
just out of hospital for her left knee

but once slipped into it’s everywhere —
the woman at the dell’Arte Moderna slowing
past the Cy Twombly, the man tilting against light
to decipher marks in a Franco Angeli, and while
the next day you regret not saying hi at the tramstop,
there perhaps was no need, for they too

possibly felt the kinship of the beat.    The kid
in Marsala sits cross-legged by the Chiesa Mardi, where
the Nine O’Clock has just begun, and across the old marble
laneway her mum with identical begging plate
and aquiline Arab looks chats with a woman departing
lauds, like they’ve known each other for years, and

minutes are not a problem, the kid in the meanwhile
getting on with the job, plenty of stragglers
still headed in, nor are the grownups fussed
by the modest coin when eventually the woman
stoops to mum’s plate, it being time to tackle
the rest of the morning’s business. The fish market

down the street is a sizzling new-white marble, while
over to the right, past the Punic warship museum
the sea is a slow aqua.