POSEIDON HIMSELF

POSEIDON HIMSELF

you still pulling, tug-of-warring
on that single silver strand
(or could it
be golden?)

hoping that something bites
and then everything unravels?

fish
   of fantasy, of your
dreams
  letting itself get reeled in

Yes,
I used to fish when I
lived at False Bay
catch white steenbras
and haarders using
smelly red bait

mainly from the pedestrian bridge just
below the hall named
after Theodore Weizmann

but you
fishing from a boat
and, at this
precise moment
I am there in the prow
practically sitting
next to you

(we do not
have to be inside the theatre
to break the fourth wall)

any place will do
any place
that can allow us
an interface, provide
us with a boundary

special sphere slash dimension
perfect to allow us
negotiate
where we are

so much
     here with a sort of
Old Testament flavour

not Sinai but
mouse mountain and
               my first little
school
   in South Africa
pocketed beneath

both of us
turned confederate
wrestling with that
nylon line
who knows what
tiddler, guppy, denizen,
demon
    we are reeling in, maybe
the great Leviathan (or one
of them) from
the blazing
words of
       scripture itself

maybe
baby
     great white or
sleek and lethal adolescent

or (with outrageous luck)
an eager Nereid, Nemo’s
Nautilus,
      perhaps Poseidon himself

builder of Troy, shaker
of continents,

oozing with the raw power
to remind us
               we are not gods
we are
barely signifiers

but when we cast, we called
          they were
bound
to come