11. all cross the river [one]

All cross the river (1)









Those that walking hug the side of the bridge

They peer from the balustrade

And down there are the waders

The swimmers

There are the bulges of those that drowned.



No parcels or belongings too big are saved

Just little stuff

The big items slowly flow away with the drowned.



On the train that running at the center of the bridge

Crosses the river

The cops are hard at it

They don’t want “nobody that don’t belong”

They wield the flat machines

Against which none is ever shielded enough

The machines that ascertain if...

If you then really belong

If you wouldn’t then be a damned stowaway

If you’d be then a passer of forbidden material

And then so on.



Here they come

They scan the blind man

“And what is this...?”

They snidely ask – (a thick sheaf of smuggled banknotes?)

(It rather looks like)

“Those, sirs, must be the observations on the beetles”

(Observations, piff!)

But no really

The blind man is an expert on beetles

He’s got them all carefully described

In them tightly packed sheets of rusting paper

He examines them (and damn the stings and acids)

By touch

Smell

Taste

Plus he has all the sounds they ever make down pat

Only missing are the colors

Every bug gray

Utterly gray

And the cops are puzzled

“Should we kick him down as the train moves?”

“Do we ignore him also?”

“Is there gonna rain another blind man

On the sedulous

River crossers?”

There are some rowdy youths

That divert attention

They are combating at twisting one’s limbs

Let those that twist farther without breaking

Be the winners

Ok but less loudly

The cops are against a woman now

“Smelling cunt and melting and molting and melding hard”

But a harmless joke amongst comrades

(Hey is she infected...?)

“What’s this...!”

With a sudden strike of his talon

The cop scraps and snatches

A lentil of blood

That was stuck on her body

“That woman has lentils of blood!”

The cops get busy

Snapping at the lentils of blood

Scrambling like rats on a body that’s dying

The woman’s screaming

And now she is tossed down into the reddening river.



How agreeably though in the beds

The few that cram them

Seeing the combats developing afar

“It is all like a movie”

The wives touching the legs of the husbands of others

The husbands likewise

(Or widdershins rather)

And the warmth enveloping one

The warmth and the bodies

The windows so golden

In the crepuscular light.