Redding Poem 2
"Sacramento River WordScape"
These descendent waters swim like mad lagoon fish,
Heading decidedly south with a fiery mindless turn,
Their cool liquid urgencies reaching to all sides enticing
The bosomy turning earth and its pectoral indecencies,
With an impotent power unknown to anyone alive now,
As watery signatures knife their way into the crestfallen sand bars,
Adrift in an ambiguous undertow of death-marked reticences;
Swimming and floating lazily as a red lily floats downstream,
Enveloped cooly in blue clarity, absorbed by diamond sureness,
These arching trees lapping inward the reeking salmon atoms,
As rippling currents of heaving hands and wild bone sneezes,
Salvage the unsalvageable, and a solitary blue bird
Jiggling a crimson ring, as it bobs upon its ascended perch.
Unheeded in the spread of his name, quaking
Through the knit brow cuddling the sombre eye
Twice buckled into the couch of his yearning
The mouldy cast of unsculptured hands, moulting
In the surging sweaty cries' unexpected sigh
Sooner lost than won with unrenewed longing
Every day, every night in chastened haste, calling
That one face, one hand trembling on bosomy thigh
Through all the twigs of his knotty brooding
Mighty log in the dismembered chips, raking
In uneasy orgasms of a protracted lie
The woman clasped in the memory revolting
Fleshy hair to press, hovering nostrils, drinking
In the incensing vapours, and that face a wry
Screaming in the rubbing spasm, a bloody cursing
All, all and more, and the biting shame, clawing
Now at the name, silently growing, that shy
Child of old hopefully shared and lingered moaning
© T. Wignesan, 1960, first pub. in "Forum Academicum", University of Heidelberg, 1957 (from the collection: Tracks of a Tramp. Kuala Lumpur-Singapore: 1961)
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