Listen for the whist of unrippled wells
of water, still ponds, dead quiet lakes
you might walk to through wheatfields
and rolled fields of new-flowered flax
into an otherworld of woodland
where boys have stopped playing
soldiers and laid down broken branches
to finger caterpillars, where you might
first have opened lips to feel a tongue
alive in your mouth moons ago.
Lie still by such a low pond and catch
the thistled breeze and shallow flies,
insects twitching in the verbena
and firethorn, the tufted clouds’
degression, a distant Citroën engine.
Better still, go on a winter’s night
when you might catch the chattered tink
of your own teeth, the buffets of a barn
owl’s wings, shadows that flusker and flitch
over the silver pool’s ice and secrets.
For the days are taken and poured
like whiskey into the well of a glass:
for a while we hold the sunset
in hard-worked hands, then drain the glass.
Look through the window on a winter’s
night—some might possess your body
but none the hole vented through
that two-way glass, no more than hold
the snow, the lunatic, the vanishing child,
as you lose your reflection in the frost.
For we are swept up in the city’s
cashflows and contusions, violet mouths
and japing eyes, until one night,
land-locked in our poverty, caught and cut
up by the glaze of cold eyes, we feel
a sliver of still water, a midnight pool,
and in that fleet stretch of time
before we empty our rusting spirits
into the well of a glass, deep within us,
broken cubes of moonlight tinkle and chime.