An excerpt from the follow-up/-on to The Floating Harbour.
“Where do we go from here?
Though we might get lost in the layers…
still, we can’t stay here.”
– The Floating Harbour
“But how… could a language die?”
She ceased in her caressing of the symbols into sand, proud yet pained at how they lay ephem’ral.
The woman, knelt amongst the linen that she moved ‘n mended, tilted o’er her head, her tan eyes keeping handward.
“Well, Shu may sweep across the land and will away the grooves you practice in vulnerable ground. But even in the rock and on the painted walls – inscriptions carved; reliefs rendered in all their colour – there hides the threat of oblivion. What you’ve written rests behind a seal.”
“But you’ve told me what they mean.” She brushes – light – three fingers through her formed, imperfect hand.
“And if you forgot, and I were gone?”
Balanced on her haunches, her heels above the ground, her hands hung limp between her bended knees, the girl-child kept her verdant eyes locked – thoughtful – on her writing, comprehending their incomprehensibility.
In the pregnant pause gestates an understanding.
“There is no way to protect what I’ve created.”
The woman: “Nor that brought to life by others.”
The event horizons of their irides, melanined in magellanic clouds, fall infinitely on into their soul-dark apertures.
Deep-em’rald, azure-laced;
teak, torn by oxblood wisps.
Two paths curve t’ward an empty cradle.
“Where’d you find me?”
Our man in England’s south-west city-port laughed at his strewn-out friend.
“You don’t recall that?”
He does not.
“You don’t recall our trav’ling back?”
No, he doesn’t. And so he asks:
“Speaking of back: where are we now?”
“A city, b’yond a glacial gorge, floating on a muddy Nile.”
“Ohhh do” (The stretching, strewn-out man contorts his brow ‘n forehead.) “piss off with that. Ta.”
Flicking out into the haze-held sky a smoked-through cigarette, his lungs dispersing air turned into laughter by the vocal cords, he told his friend – e’en while he groaned – that he would paint for him the view “and from that you will know just where we are. You ready?!”
No, he isn’t.
william altoft 