seen from bird’s-eye view –

   and it is bird, not drone –

the garden organises itself

around one old fountain

   a tortoise, and a dead man –

who wouldn’t shiver

   if he awoke?

a mechanism of lenses

determines my longhand –

   the inner convex lens

zooms in on grief

   the outer concave lens

confused by the day’s fog

curtains history’s clarity:

fountains and tall palms

emerged on Mediterranean

   shores, half-antipodal

and to the dead we call

when the origins of beauty

   are blurred

by capital and water.

man, gone, what would

   you make of this me

unkempt now inwards

with eyesight dispersed

by prisms? I could not

see the fountain clearly

   for what it was.