Reverse Double Ozymandias
When I opened my eyes, Taciturn was sidling down the smooth, slanted embankment. He stepped into the shallow river and waded out to the towering pillars of concrete. I rose creakily and started down the bank as well to inspect the scene up close. Contrasted with the section downriver of the bridge—with its rocks and rapids, sedgy edges and hunting herons—on this side of Willow Street glided a stream of unction along its symmetrical way. The concrete bed, slick with algal sludge, was dotted with islets of accumulated garbage from a million passers-by and passers-over the river, the waste and the want-not of continuous consumption, the phosphorescent and effervescent effluents of production and transportation. Shopping carts, not so much abandoned as collapsed from exhaustion, birthed the larger islets, conglomerating layers of plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic boxes, blankets, sediments, clumps, sticks, plastic wrapping. As Taciturn inspected the concrete uprights, gulls flocked in the mid-stream flotsam. A lone black-necked stilt, on what looked like backward-bent red legs, stepped with care through the watery muck and rubble, its head sometimes sweeping the surface like an automaton metal-detector, to and fro, the sensitive beak searching for life. I studied the bizarre structure and copied down the Hughes quotation in my notebook."Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" —Percy Bysshe Shelley
When the captain rejoined me at the water’s edge, a small crowd had begun to gather above us on the east bank. The heat from the morning sun intensified, so we walked along the bottom of the embankment to the shade and silence of the Willow Street bridgeworks. “What do you make of it?” he asked, as he took out a couple granola bars from a belt compartment.
I had no idea what to make of it. “So you’re saying that the blocks of the two structures used to lie flat on the river bed?” Taciturn confirmed. “And now they’ve been assembled into this … this …”
A Taciturn throat-clearance interrupted my stumble for words. I said the first thing that came to mind: “Reverse double Ozymandias.”
“A little early for a cocktail, isn’t it?” replied the captain.
“‘Ozymandias’ is a poem,” I said. “One of my favorites.”
“By this person Hughes?” Taciturn asked.
I shook my head. “Shelley. A ‘traveller’ tells of having found the ruins of a colossal statue, ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone.’ There’s an inscription on the pedestal, by ‘Ozymandias, King of Kings,’ boasting of his great power, but only the ruin and decay and nothingness remain.
I paused for effect, letting the images come together in Taciturn’s mind.
“Interesting,” responded the captain. “But not very helpful.” Had I not been accustomed to such reactions, I might have been abashed. After a brief discussion of next steps, we parted on our separate missions—Taciturn to the hospital to check on the fisherman and I to my rooms to prepare for a long-day’s library session on Rupert Hughes.