An oak, prostrate,
after standing
six hundred years,
begins to rot

Insects break down
ringed chronicles,
fungi turn the
hardwood to sponge

Mayflies (before
the big orange
light of evening)
rising and falling

Linnets (on this
mass of plant and
boulder before sky)
sing on evening

A glacier carved
this long valley
slipped into a river
became a stream

Caddisflies gather
fragments of slate
minnoes pick algae
from sediment

A hole in the ice, two fingers thick,
Just wide enough for a goldfish
Where a goldfish froze half out,
Half in cold-blooded sub terrain
Until my cat, in fiendishness,
Snapped the head like an icicle

I found a mermaid tail rotting,
Shimmering in the rainbow slick
That welled in its empty thorax
Of diagrams and wonderment
And sunlight that eventually
dismantles a puzzle of ice.

Of all the thoughts who's only testament
was a brief stirring in the morning air
from the time that we spoke them
and the house plants that we bought new
which grew and died by small degrees
and no one appeared to notice,
the bank charges, snippets of interest,
too disparate to be more than irritation
and I think of all the pavements I have walked
and I find it is my heels that wear the greatest

Stop-motion

From the infinitesimal
I, either-which-way, select
One moment and the next
Stop, go, stop, go it goes
Go, go, go, the illusion is
The illusion that there is no life
in twenty thousand tick-tocks,
from one look of the sun to the next,
and we say little of the dark-time hours

Watercolour blocks
In primary colours
At primary school
The dirty brush
Brushes them all
And the wash water
then becomes grey
as pigeon droppings
and the television
since the bbc killed
the technicolour girl
with the doll and
the chalk board,
left black/white sand
as grey as the sound
mistaken for droppings.