Your lineage is as old as coal,
your life, in the swirl of stars,
a twitch of plasma on a reed.

Rafting down the Zambezi
I saw your filigree shimmer
on a boulder’s bulky sphinx.

The raft had spun in an eddy,
bumped up against a gorge
and grounded on a cornice.

I was glad to rest. Upstream
a vortex in the slide of green
had flung the raft on its back

and for an eternity of panic
had swirled me down, down,
churning me in its Charybdis,

until I felt certain I would die.
How greedily then I registered
the powdery, glistening bands

of crimson around your back,
each wingtip’s lunette of blue.
I dipped a finger in the river

and wrote my name in water
on the hot, eroded granite.
Before I’d streaked the last letter

the writing and you had gone.