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
Lovely from beginning to end