THE DAINTY MONSTERS
Michael
Ondaatje
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Come to the Desert
When seventeen it was water.
I, a moving silk,
bubbles draining from my skull
would twist down
with black ugly feet
and my hair would toss
slow, like grass.
Around me a fearful potency.
Churning with precision
polyps would take years to be conceived
made up of salt and drifts of sunlight
captured and brought down to green sand.
Today though
this potency has been replaced in children
formed in minutes among thighs,
locked in ribs.
They grow orderless, kick
to escape the blurred garden.
And like them I look for sunlight.
I turn to deserts
and with a camel squatting patiently
chewing dry jaws
the tail a pendulum, I hunch,
move grain off stone eyes.
And then stand
wheeling with heat and glare
while entering through the horizon
lions, shapeless in the sun, turn
towards me in an army,
their padding feet
magnifying to a drum.
Meanwhile
here
the snow turns.
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