A year of not writing

Too much traffic on this road

Not enough time

and stillness

for words to grow

like fungi. Delicate-limbed

plants so thin they are

translucent

In Rioja in a walled town in a cellar I had some wine

that had  complicated whorls

of musty-vegetal-sweetness

in its nose

because of tiny creatures

that lived on the skins

of its grapes, flown

in by fruit-flies to

grow in the ridged

nooks, crannies-

of aging barrel-

staves

Brettanomyces

Winemakers kill the little creatures

by bottling the wines after

sterile filtration

terrible phrase

like a Coetzee novel

Months of sanitized office walls

sterile and filtered, have left tall, white

canyons, an endless

canvas strait-jacket

in my head

Meandering  camel-paths have become

asphalted-over

No weaving caravans

from Xi’an, where the king of Qin 
had his terracotta golems, 

through Kashgar and Samarkand
Mongol, Turkic and Persian  

to Palmyrene 
caravanserai, souqs 
at Aleppo,

Constantinople...

No ships embark

from the Moluccan archipelago

or Jiaozhi, beyond 
the Golden Chersonese
clinging tight

to the coasts of

Malabar and Coromandel
past the tip of Serendib

to the Aksum empire or

through the  Bab-el-mandeb

up the Red Sea

Only jet-planes now

and straight

colourless contrails

in the sky