The Drowned Book
Philip Gross, from Mappa Mundi, Bloodaxe, 2003

A summer so dry
the bracken crackled
like twigs on a fire.
The fields grew blond,
hopelessly, flyaway.
Around the reservoir

heatwaves walked
like crazy-paving
mud like revenants
of stink. And then a gable
showed, a hint first,
then accumulating evidence:

a wall rendered with silt
raised slowly like a wreck
for fear of sundering;
a door in its frame
that had fallen out whole;
the roof slumped in,

but gently, off its greasy
stays. It took a week
before the blister crust
might take a child’s weight.
The youngest, lightest,
got there first - the first

for thirty years. Peered
in. Thin mud drapes
like dust sheets. All
moveables gone, but
in the corner, a square
stone sink, still full

to the brink and - he’d swear,
years later - as he brushed
the surface, something pale:
a book. (How long had they had
to load the cart, the waters rising?
Sunday-dressed for the sale,

the neighbours, condolent
as crows ...) Pounds, shillings,
ha’pence, farthings. As he touched
the columns shivered, the fine
lines of profit and loss
dissolved and he clutched

nothing solid - a swirl of scurf
as the water grew milky and,
for such a hot day, oddly cold
and when the others found him
crying, there was no proof.
Nothing he could hold.