The Day after the Flood

I was in Copenhagen when I had learned that Carley was missing, that she had fallen in the Partnach River.

The dream is always the same.
Steel blue water, cold, silent, like a grave,
and it was a grave.
It had woke me, as it does,
at the point when I see her;
bloated and wedged between two erratic boulders,
ancient, tired rocks,
moved by glaciers, drowned by mountains’ rivers,
and left to press, and squeeze her
like rollers in an wringer washing tube.
Always the same bits of her flesh peeling away like dying salmon,
clouded lidless eyes,
and her name whispered, faint:
Carley.

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