Water Diviner

Down here you’re with the possible
pre-verbal life: that holy well
with skeletons at the bottom.

You’re not looking for fool’s gold,
that pretence at understanding
dredging the sea bed

or covering mirrors
so you can’t see spirits of the dead.
You want the real thing, don’t you?

You are that generation. Insight,
second sight, the view over the loch
from on high, where you can stand in the wind

observing the Gulf Stream, the green sky foam
that was Aurora Borealis
and the two hundred and fifty million year core

of the Chacaltaya Glacier,
once the highest ski resort on earth
now a fossil-feather memory, a shingle

where its through-flow ice
gave up the ghost.
Gone in the blink of an eye.