On Edward Burtynsky’s photograph, Feng Jie #5
Not the roadbed’s rubble-banked “river” this river’s flood
too sluggish to rise on wings of inverted quotes cuts
channels broader than the metaphor fills not that stream
nor those grey-foamed swells rolling across the road over
the heads of a man and his donkey welling up from
two small fires the picture’s sole bright undoings silken
shimmers of orange-hooded spirits that make ash from
the picture’s only wood for this river gets along
with fire shares fire’s enmity for the water that is
as missing from the picture as from the moon ashen
hillside dust-covered shards of cinderblock dusty man
and donkey the one non-human form of life borne on
this river which supports neither pink Yangtze dolphin
nor finless porpoise and which has drowned in its torpor
sturgeon and soft-shelled turtle whose avenging ghosts throng
the river and possess the bodies of more deadly
swimmers endotoxins benzopyrenes aerosol
denizens of a bed too wide to bridge too savage
a tide for any dam to hold river everywhere
but nowhere in the picture like a god’s messenger
gifted with invisibility and winged helmet
stronger than hardhats that will not shield crews spidering
wrecked ramparts in the distance what chance for tender manes
of donkey or man as he leads the beast burdenless
and festive in studded red halter through the river
to sacrifice do his feet break into a half-run
his face into a smile in hope of pleasing the god
who lives in the west whose urgings will deliver him
up where airborne blades finer than spider legs sweeping
through the forest of his lungs will open more rivers