INFINITE MERSEY

Just before the bog-
leached, tea-stained

Mersey spills
and thunders

over Mill Falls'
polished slate

outcrop (severed
from its mother-

lode of metamorphic
Africa in the late

Proterozoic
five hundred

million years ago)
and pours

into a foam-
scummed pool below,

a granite boulder
splits the river

like the shoulder
of some Titan

felled and fallen
in the flow.

Here, we chose
to make our camp.

When late sunlight,
breaching over-

cast, lands
at that just-so

slant, the erratic
stone, kindled, glows

like a thousand-
candled lamp.

So it will go,
until the soapy, bog-

leached, tea-stained
Mersey scours

it down and
lays it low.

Kejimkujik