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[trainsongs]

The Hour of Cowdust, Michael Ondaatje

It is the hour we move small
in the last possibilities of light

now the sky opens its blue vault

I thought this hour belonged to my children
bringing cows home
bored by duty swinging a stick,
but this focus of dusk out of dust
is everywhere- here by the Nile
the boats wheeling
like massive half-drowned birds
and I gaze at water that dreams
dust off my tongue,
in this country your mouth
feels the way your shoes look

Everything is reducing itself to shape

Lack of light cools your shirt
men step from barbershops
their skin alive to the air.
All day
dust covered granite hills
and now
suddenly the Nile is flesh
an arm on a bed

In Indian miniatures
I cannot quite remember
what this hour means
-people were small,
animals represented
simply by dust
they stamped into the air.
All I recall of commentaries
are abrupt lovely sentences wehre
the colour of a bowl
a left foot stepping on a lotus
symbolize seeparation.
Or stories of gods
creating such beautiful women
they themselves burned in passion
and were reduced to ash.
Women confided to pet parrots
solitary men dreamed into the conch.
So many
graciously humiliated
by the distance of rivers

The boat turns languid
under the hunched passenger
sails
ready for the moon
fill like a lung

there is no longer
depth of perception
it is now possible
for the outline of two boats
to collide silently