at the poseidon statue

here I finally have reached your waters

from the mountain I have raced down

with the fire that strummed the clouds

and to the stillness of your controlled rage,

 

I come to wash away the forests scars

the rivers have run where I sped

and they too have carried the air

that in their young age have breathed above

now they murmur the bariton grappling

of ripples on ripples rived ravenously

to the graven melody of ground gurgling,

 

and at the margins of the pool I behold

worshipping vegetative kingdoms

that to you bend the meticulous gifts

of amalgamated lymph and dust and light

spared from eager ravishing grasps

to give to you one last eternal homage.

 

from all this bounty that the view frames

you emerge immobile and solemn

with no effort recorded on your chiselled

veins always to hold nest in the marble

that locked your motion in a never fading impulse

spreading from your wrinkles checks

to the waters that at your feet break and roll.

 

divine rules of the engulfing tides!

when will I be able to master

the affondo of your mordent trident

and the stillness of seas doomed depth?

I reached these waters but I am not

worthy of them_ I can only flow and smote

like the clouds reading the mountains on high

folding in the poured storms to search

for a breach on the river bed where

the irascible overflowing flood

has nothing to quench the land with

but the exploit of more thirst ground.

 

when shall I be able to rest as your waters

that a photograph can reflect but not musicalize

in the notes that wade and fade at your holding sight

whose everchanging intonation and heaping exchanges

no recording media can afford so long a time

 to capture and master?

 

so I commend my body of dust and ashes to yours

unable to trace as easily a continuity

as cartographers can track,

for the geographies that have brought me here

to your waters hardly contained in any map,

to seek with the ineludible engulfing of the estuaries

the final relief in the detritus abandoned to the currents,

hoping for expiation on the rising of the summer clouds

toward the embrace of your tamed springs,

where I will be nursed in a rest that could syphon

the colours of the shimmering lights

to the darkness of your filtering profundity