Sunken Idol
The wise scholars believe you are lost forever. Your existence has passed into myth, like the great buddha asleep inside a niche of red sandstone, escaping wilful destruction by the feral armies of marauding warlords. You once endured nature’s savagery, ensconced on the steppe, strafed by fierce gales and daggers of ice and snow. In the spring, nomads on their journey east used to stop beside you and spread out their precious travelling rugs and rest awhile, before moving on. You may recall a small boy who danced alongside one of the departing wagons, chasing the swift shadows cast by the racing clouds, while his little sister watched, perched high up on her mother’s lap.
Now you are swathed in a twilight world on an unmade seabed, your arms embracing tall knees clasped by sinuous hands, fingers knotted, your eyes closed, dreaming of a lost love. My demon of the steppe, now a sunken idol.
An emerald gleam plays across the silver bark of your skin, while a festive garden of anemones has sprung up at your feet, perhaps planted there by mermaids. Your scarred brow is adorned with a coronet of barnacles bone-white, your luxuriant dark locks teased by the ghost of a summer breeze, whispering to you of your old home, but your face remains impassive, lined with livid coral, harsh to touch. The sea has become your sanctuary.
I wonder at the resilience of those clasped arms, fearing they might break apart like shipwrecked spars and drift away, but they have lasted this long.
I would gladly cast away my precious haul of cowries and tusk shells and climb inside the darkened hollow of your embrace and caress your forehead, kiss those partly open lips, even if it draws blood, and raise you up to my world, a world you once knew. Yet I fear you would be harmed by the cruel blades of light dancing on the glassy surface, making your fragile carapace crack or corrode into salty spoil. So I will leave you there — unfathomable, a strange folly of love for little fish to weave around. Perhaps one day, you will no longer be the prisoner of your dreams and I can return to bathe in the sapphire of your gaze.
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