Anaglyph 1
Birds lose their shape in the bright sunlight. After he showed me the poem he'd been writing that afternoon I looked at the sky. The clouds were heavy with the odour of their lost, moist colours. Visitors to the garden were avoiding the central maze, as we did too. So much had been happening. In the hotel before our arrival the swamp water had risen and the cloying scent of jungle flowers penetrated all the rooms. The foyer had collected a gaggle of men with beards. A thin man wearing a green felt hat was bending down to listen to the jabber on a girl's green radio. Later my yellow gauntlets fell on a plain of grass with a fragile white tower where doves congregated. I was appalled to discover that the birds had yellow beaks and red, stick-like legs and voices that were not mine or anyone's. Looking down on how far I had to go, they dived and spread their wings. The lake was empty. Night slithered towards me like a secretive carp, surprising me before I could be what I wanted to become. I didn't mention this. The poem, he said, was like a fountain, shooting upwards and then falling back, sometimes strong and sometimes weak, but never stopping all the same. It was just like the palm trees he'd seen through the window when he woke that morning, they were like a fountain too, but a different kind of fountain. We reached the courtyard where a small wooden sphynx sprouting from a ring of ragged grasses on a stained concrete plinth had already scented quite a few victims, who were now peering down at it. White walls surrounded us. We watched a woman dressed in black lean out of a high window. She dropped a piece a paper, then retreated back into the darkness. The paper fluttered like a butterfly. He said it must be a message so we hurried to where it fell. But a wind carried it through an archway and far out into another garden. We heard women's voices coming from the trees. The message, we reasoned, might have shown us an escape route from the maze.
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