Little Epic

Carol Rumens        

L'anguilla, torcia, frusta,
freccia d'Amore in terra - L'anguilla, Montale

Everything was yet to be imagined -
even the river with her sandy blushes,
slithering up the chrome-work barrier,
and the bridge, that heron slenderness, its soaring
cruelly earthed by strings of disguised rain;
motorways, beach-walks - vanishing perspectives
of latitude - all were unmeasured since
geography had never heard of you;
and nothing in the six-fold darkness stirred.
A god can have his project almost finished
before he lights upon that little spiral
of mud which seethes it into sense, but I,
the lesser maker, needed last things first:
before the supernovae, clouds, volcanoes
and icebergs - Adam! Stealthily engraved
(work of a star, perhaps, I dared not ask)
a human symbol lit the stone. The river
edged around it, birds hovered above it:
museums were bright with fish, shopping-malls claimed the sea.
Everything was more itself since printed
with some fine trace of you; even the air
feathered uncertainly into a footprint.
Then, like the washed-up oil-drum, swamped and emptied
with every thrust, I tried to turn aside
and rest - but from no angle could refuse it -
sea-fire and lash and squalor of love's earthing
till the hard shape was broken, and creation
had drained the world, leaving it bridgeless water.