from Pond Life : 29th May
White Feather
In May I remember October’s road,
drenched sodden dips full of flood.
There was a white feather
boating the slouch of water.
Fatherhood,
is flooded with childhood.
The activity
of old, aggressive inheritance
saturates ground;
still I could fight for nothing.
Hand on the rod: hand it on,
try
to retain a standing strong enough
from which to draw an aquatic power
up,
to catch the mercurial mood,
to see in the fading light,
to forge better instinct.
A spider at its harp
is waiting too, for inspiration.
from Pond Life : 21st June
the Lung of the Great Diving Beetle
In human form we move
to breathe;
sad with this fact,
for what is sacred?
Tonight, in our longest-eyes-back
up the tunnel of the road to the pool,
I feel how the world is a fish egg,
rupturing, hatching;
the atmosphere, a lung,
as under the wing-case
of this great diving beetle
dipping to prey, into sex and death,
like us;
whose lung, prised off air,
is a bubble under its carapace,
a silvered reserve,
a torch-bulb of gas
beaming down through its body
so it can see in the fire.