Grebe Gulps Down Lake Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

The soaked bone sun
is dropping, bouncing

into the whistling
bowels of a widening gorge.

The higher drier sky has
dropped here too,
stretching itself across

into a woolly layer,
a flock of ambling white sheep
swelling their backs

into drifting alabaster,
on which a lighter,

brighter air frolics
with the blanketing
sheathe of a light furnace,
where the sun has leaked

into a thinning mist
and sheets of breaking air,

a snow-white floor
slashing a horizon's wall
into slabs and shards.

(ii)

Earth is an expanding slate
carrying bumps
and small dark-gray rocks of salt
cutting cream stretches

into steps thin slopes
diving into water's arctic carpet.

The floor flattens out
into a wide spade

chopping off a horizon's waist
floating in pools
of plastic melting fog,

as a cloud rides
the camel saddling me

by a dromedary drunk
with height,
as another tumbling sky

glides and jumps
for a thicker dose of sky.

(iii)

Light has fled earth
and climbed
a hill of spiked rays

building a pyramid
of flamy fires.

The sky below the higher
ceiling of flames

roasts and barbecues
chunks of fleshy
shredded and lumped clouds

to settle in a widening
furrow bleaching
its wings roasted

by armpits of rising sails
from the deck
of an anchored ship of the world

carrying dead birds
hurled off a nestless sky.

(iv)

A cotton ball of sun
sits on a peak
candle-lit and sprayed
by the cloudy flame of a white bird.

And burns down an arc
of wax into
a low-lying cloud of a grebe

gulping down a lake,
as waters thin off into the bird's mouth

beneath a fallen ice-frightened
and frozen dromedary.

Tadjoura, near Lake Assal, Djibouti,2009