from Maiden Moor

Across the Great Depression by Peter Armstrong

... so that left only me,
and the black dog picked up
in what passes for a town
down along the minus contours,
the rivers that go running
with their backs to the sea.

I forget how long along
the mad paving of that dead floor
before the dog-talk sifted into sense:
waking as it licked the green out
from the corner of my eye, the fissures
where my lips forgot to meet,
I'd hear it gravel - sotto voce,
like the natives said their prayers -
Further out and further down!
over and again and spitting to the left,
or chanting his lugubrious Baedeker:
You must see the empty quarter yet,
the sickle-moons of sand that wait
to swallow whole your every step
(further out and further down!). We must
map the salt road's dry extremes,
the abandoned philadelphias
of the upturned foothills
- circling me widdershins all the while
and never once his sunk eye
shifting from one last skin of water
slapping at my shoulder.
The mountains jogged
with my every step
and kept their distance.

Even when the flora
surfaced from whatever
dug-out it had minded
there among the moon-rock
and the shadows of the scarp-face,
there he was, all nuzzle
in the hollow of my ear
muttering the skin was but a crust -
one step hurried over-quick
and the whole caboodle
would go trapdoor underfoot.
It was somewhere in between
the first mud of the wadi
and what must have been the monastery
(I forget the days, the waking
to each dumb beneficent face)
one or other of us lost the knack
of the speaking or the hearing
and he'd skulk off at a stone's throw
barking like a foreigner
or an Englishman at one.
I won't bore you with the sand-worms
and the snakes of salt,
that mirage of the twenty-fifth
- when they found me at the rail-head
beating off the camels
from a puddle in the gutter,
the dog lay on its belly
and welded shut his jaws against
the indulgences of water.
These mornings when I open
my light-infested curtains
he'll be skin and skull below me
in the rhododendron's shadows,
the happy rats obese
from the scraps he never takes.