Sport 40: 2012
PHYSICAL OPTICS VII
PHYSICAL OPTICS VII
the steel coil of the current stretches from the levee
to a buoy that strains against the danube
the river’s balance spring · to the right of the shipping lane
nothing more drifts down · the stick in the muddy
waves at the bend that sits like a pallet
on the escape wheel of a swirl is my other marker
for this half hour · from the barrel moored to the riverbed
to the rowing boat rotted by the rain
is a line through which the branches of the minutes glide
the trees that have grown with the wind on the towpath
two then one and then three draw time
into their intervals · they peg out the frame for the gauge
in this regulating circuit of the gaze · but at the landing stage
it all comes apart when the pictures get
too close · under the green of the water
the pendulum slows and swings to a standstill at the wet
shimmer of a water level as if the river
could find no ground nor followed a course to the end
of things · waves overlap so that some partly
cancel each other · the weight of the buoy on its cable
holds the river to its bounds just as the sand
becomes a riverbank only at a distance · the eye
prefigures it · the landscape itself merely
hints at contours that are barely defined as if
solely the feasible could last · as if the real were set
to happen seconds in advance or as if a rift
were close to that high water mark · but the yardstick
is fixed to nothing · the stake breaks like an arm that lunges
into a mirror and is refracted by the surface
of the river: it bends and eventually snaps · a willow twig