Ivan Head: Two Poems

               Yeats’s Pond

 

When he sat by the pond,

He noticed how unhurried it all was

And at what slow pace time passed,

And felt drawn into that.

 

If truth be told

He was drawn in before he noticed,

Since he himself

Had slowed

 

This was in the fountain’s gift.

Some rings in the meniscus appeared

When Water Beetles flicked up to surface.

Fish he’d thought eaten by birds

 

Emerged for a moment

From their brick alleyways

Beneath the Waterlily pots

And surprised him.

Mosquitoes hovered at ping pitch and

 

A sawn oak log going around this small world,

Having dried out a year in the Sun,

Slowly resoaked, floating lower and lower across the month.

 

Now at the dense point of sinking.

It was more solid wooden submarine.

“The Journey of the Log”
He thought and watched

The tadpole sucking on its bark

As tranquil passenger.

Birds came by frequently and the algal bloom had vanished.

 

The fountain

Splashed and splashed,

Disturbing any water-poised quest of

The long-legged fly.

 

His mind was in it in some way.

 

Three days later it all came back to him

When he heard the counter-tenor on the radio

And a beautiful voice

Held onto the upper note in the upper register.

 

He began to wonder whether

He could in one single tether

Co-intuit the named things he was seeing

And their transcendental ground in being.

 

 

 

 

           Inside the Watertank

 

The most dangerous thing

Was to lift the hatch

On the elevated watertank

High up on its brick legs,

Creeper and moss covered,

On that hottest summer day,

Immerse myself within that silent womb,

Out of the way, unseen in

The quietness of undisturbed water

 

And realising how quietly silent

Font-like it was to pause

And let the water wash away weeks, months, years,

Then wonder if I would be found

If old electric wires were wrong,

If I never made my way back to ground

And I dissolved to bones—

 

Having told no one

I would check the failed reticulation

On the rare off chance

A miss hit tennis ball had got into the valve

As once had happened years ago

To the gully roof on St Cuthbert’s Cambuslang.

 

But I knew I would be found

Since the stink would have been profound.

Stupid man.

 

                                         Ivan Head