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Mike Barlow

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Silk Road Dreams

(after Colin Thubron)

An old woman sleeps by a holy spring.
She has a thirst dreams slake.
Her head rests on an alder root,
her bunched form swaddled in skirts
and the tattered coat she married in once.

Brides mount the steps,
bouquets and glittering brooches,
a fuss of relatives. They stand
beneath the President, his stern
stone look, his birdlime epaulettes.

Behind them come unsmiling grooms,
like plainclothes police in regulation suits.
She looks for his face among them
but he’s gone, dissolved
before she can make out if it’s him.

Now she’s crossing a desert. A suit of armour
sprawls before her. She lifts the vizor.
A face that could be his or could be
her brother’s stares through centuries
and says: I’m hurt. Don’t let me die.

She’s climbing steps again, worn
hexagonal stones through willow
and swallowsong. The buddha of the future
sits fat with history like an outsized doll
squeezed stuck in a gateway.

A monk approaches, fumbling a tin bowl.
She fishes out her housekey, drops it in.
He signs for her to follow. At the river
wading women link arms in the moonlight
feeling for jade with their toes.

Mike Barlow won the National Poetry Competition in 2006. He has two collections, Living on the Difference (Smiths Doorstop) and Another Place (Salt). His pamphlet, Amicable Numbers, was a winner in the 2008 Templar Competition and a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice.

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