Drowning in a Kharez

Someone has drowned out there – in a kharez.

What the hell is a kharez? Brian wants to know.

John launches into a description, but my brain stalls,

stuck on the shit show that this is. Drowning –

in a desert well of all things. How the world must have fallen away.

He would have been there – walking – and then suddenly gone

like the swoosh of a garbage chute, boots bent backwards,

kit clanging down the sides of a rock wall.

Jesus, he might have said.

Then maybe his vacancy would have reached a place

in the back of someone’s head – muffled water burps

like a far off fish jumping on an evening pond –

and the mad scramble would have begun

on hands and knees across the rock face, frantically

feeling the ground for an opening of some sort.

Rope – someone yelled. I need fucking rope.

Get me some rope up here now. Then in the dark,

punctuated by the plink of gravel being kicked over an edge,

his men thundered in towards that hole,

sweat shaken from their eyes, flashlights gripped in their teeth.

Get him the fuck out.

From down below they blocked out the sky.

Stars obliterated by the shapes of men crouched at a mouth.

Brian is disgusted. By which part I don’t know.

All of it, probably. We all are. Quiet

and hanging our heads. We want him back.

Jesus, John – Brian says, kicking a door, then a desk –

Why couldn’t you just have said

it was a well.