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This was the real
skirting the unreal
an ox-bow river on a boiling plain
water-buffalo knee deep in its leaden swirl
and me twelve-feet high surveying it,
swaying on an elephant's back, its
sure-footed ponderous grace
the rhythm of a lost world.
The sun a greasy gold webbing the plain
hot as chip fat in the sky, and
crazy peasants pic-nicking yards from
the clenched jungle's clannish gloom
where rhinos lumber, wild boar start
and the rainbow-muscled tiger lurks:
fantastic people who dwell –
how the artist in me envies them! –
in the imagination not the reason,
fatalistic but fantastic as
children of some migraine dream.
Late morning
under jacarandas toiling
and spoiling words in the head,
the safari lodge
crouched colonially behind.
At a coffee-coloured wicker table
I
contemplate in sun-whittled shade
a two-inch-wide cockroach's endless
attempts
to climb the flaky-chocolate tree trunk,
forever falling back,
never giving up.
Then the safari lodge at night licked by storm lamps and
stars, the blue mosquitos of heaven;
and a banquet on the lawn interrupted
by a pony and cart in the lumbering dark,
there none knew why.
Mystery!
Mystery! like that dry plain
enlarged in the now-dark below
its riddling
river forever on the go.
[William
Oxley]
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