Delta

Abstract

Delta P. Q. R. Anderson (bio) Months have passed, each one filled with foreboding and silence. Now disasters are flowing together into a delta that has no name, and will only be given one by geographers, who will come later, much later. —John Berger Many years on the water, manygenerations.Something more massive than amood, waking in the wake of a dream. He makesthe shore of day,leaves a net of light lying in hisshallows, lymph. Gets up. Getting hot. His muds, hispharaonicplovers. Snow he can only imagine,but falling. Daughters are half water. Long afterdark, waterpasses in their eyes. He works forDelta Soda. Pride is the man set up on hisbicycle, to work,pedaling out of the dream in acontrolled fall forward into the reeds, gasping at thecatchingof the light. Birds, their handbellsthere. [End Page 141] So should snow fall on these oldestdiligences,the husbandry of mud, the drowningbells. Afar, old words are tweezered, and theannual cloudguts itself on the Ruwenzori. Intooncoming cotton he pushes, under a black Rosettaslab. No dreamshould confuse his bones with theheat of bicycle steel, but birds knuckle the spokesnow, and his girls’eyes have whitened and desisted. Heputs out a hand, as a man landing a boat puts out ahand, but he can’toutreach the unfathomable winter ofthe dream; his daughters’ eyes thaw with tears,birds goto ground, and the river is turningsoda at his touch. [End Page 142] P. Q. R. Anderson p. q. r. anderson has published three volumes, Litany Bird, Foundling’s Island, and a long poem In a Free State: A Music (“Destined to be a landmark in South African poetry” —J. M. Coetzee) and is the recipient of South Africa’s Pringle Prize for Poetry and the Sanlam Literary Award. He teaches English at the University of Cape Town. Copyright © 2023 P. Q. R. Anderson ...