água de novo

A dried up river is like the soul

Malcolm Lowry

A dried up river is like the soul

Of a poet who can't write, yet perceives

With imperfect clarity his theme and grieves

To parched death over the drought. But his goal

Once a wholesome sea of clearest crystal

Recedes, grows gray in hartseye, like old love leaves,

Leaves the mind altogether. He conceives

Nothing to replace it: only at the pole

Of memory flickers some senseless compass.

So the river, by her grey pitying trees,

Is an agony of stones, horrors which sank

But are now declared, bleached. For it is these,

These stones and nothingness which possess

When a river is a road and mind a blank.