Phlebas V


He had shouldered his burden out into the waist-
deep and felt his kidneys begin to freeze in the
black waste, the mouths of tiny fish snap at the
brainless breathing man succumbing to the silent
tide. . .the piergirders groan and the swallows'
feathers batten in the noiseless breeze — he knows
the ocean to be men's tears, echoing silent deep
green. Of course you enjoined separation from the
others, and now that you have alit only the barren
outposts of the unfigured landscape trawl into
vision. Homogenous, hard and pimpling with a
cold, nervous diluvian energy — eden or the scarred
horizon ceding its black dreams into your tightened
heart, outcrop eternity, scurrying lizard in the
human size moving windwise evilly ashore. A step
further in the blind sound and the shelf will give
way in sand and mossy rocks to death and the old
city where your chocked lungs and fever reckon
with the corpses of lamias bound down by clinging
weed. The burnished world bellows in your salt eye
and the night sets below the peopled oceans
heaving interior, lungless driven grave. Opening
and closing the water, the world of a bubble gives
and the cold grips the bodies turning worlds
darkness moaning rich notochord.