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Pond (Figures) by Carol Watts



What if all ponds were shallow?

Thoreau, ‘The Pond in Winter’


Now we sit at the fulcrum

of light & dark, sleepy with

solstice,


& have hatched from ice

this chance to tread time

its thickening


into pond shallows, caked

& uneven, opaque as

marble,


mottling with shadows, those

darker figures, testifying

to


the impossibility of fathoming

what has taken place

here


except a keeping faith

with shallows, not depth

or


anything further, yet rucked

as if with obscuring visions,

bottomless.


*

And the crows return hungrily,

floating & scrapping, hover

over


ice like black script, or old clothes,

torn & beautiful, suddenly

figures


on a page, as someone observed,

or notes on a stave, twisting

& curled


the way their wings shatter &

merge, like years

do


seeing ragged butterflies

alive in forest clearings,

floating,


recalled from shards of light

as if in intelligent adaptation

to a freak


of interleaving, the way wind

moved light along, there, &

nowhere else.


*


Here the light has glowered & gilded

its way through a cold snap,

forming birds


into figures surviving in the snow

against a pewter sun, against

removals


& fogs, dark illuminations cut

from breath & atmospheres,

the cold


scissoring them from seasons,

below the bright lines of

dusty meteors,


etching unseen all the debris

suddenly arriving at this

declination


as if weather lifts the universe,

shaking its dust while we sleep,

its sentinels


flocking to eat, & eat, fighting,

cawing, the infinite so soon itself

a limit.


Note: At the end of the poems the last few words are in italics. This is a fragment borrowed from a poem called 'Meadow' by Tom Raworth.

__________

Carol Watts's new collection Mimic Pond is now out with Shearsman Books.


This poem was chosen by guest editor Tom Branfoot

1 comment

1 Comment


Karan Heppell
Karan Heppell
Jun 30, 2024

Lovely from beginning to end

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