Side-effects.

Under the fall
the water pounds like sacks
of wheat, not wet or cold
but a weight of water
flattening my back.
I cannot hear or see a thing
until I step from the blank wall
to where the children stand
laughing at their father's battered limbs.
They wade in and then we sit
with heads above a film of foam
that we float upon and drink at the same time,
made weightless by water as we take in
diagonals of hills against a canvas sky.

August colours saturate the eye
as skins and mouths are filled by essence of mountain:
so much rain even this rivulet
is a torrent.
In the monsoon of this summer
the bed of the burn is filled like a swirling bath.
It is tanned as tea
where peat has bled into the current.
I can taste with my tongue
what was added to the rain
for nothing comes on its own.
Nothing comes cleanly.
Even as we float the first shiver shows
the coldness buried in the water,
entering our bones.


The sun shines hot on our faces,
dazzles from the smallest ripple.
Redness comes to the skin.
We swim as long as we can
and then go down,
pass boulders turned over in the last flood
and the place where water
rushes through the rib-cage of a fallen deer.
From above we approach a network of roads,
not any of them to one place in the end.



Colin