Swimming Pool Poems 2

Here's the second instalment of poems written in France:

August 15^th 2011

holding your breath in the water

fish fold through the light

dark fingers and pale hands

in falling hair

                       

and there’s a sound

bird-rattle and tongue-click

a crackle of some unfathomable energy

forming

the sea is trying to speak

a pearled stuttering so close

it is just for you, inching into your skull

an ancient almost-song

you hear of seaquakes, millennia ago

of rifts, wide as half the earth

and changing everything

of the moon, undancing tyrant

of the long ice-darkness

of whales which throb like hearts

of love-letters in phospherence to the sky

of battles with rain

of ships, cradled like trinkets

and of you, caught in its throat

the one it sings to and the one

who stops it singing

August 15^th 2011

the sun slips into a moon-skin

the sun slips into a moon-skin

feigning a frown

and assuming a mottled brow

he loudly mopes ‘I despair of sin’

and steals away

(he does this many times

throughout the day)

August 17^th 2011

on my back, nightswimming no. 1

it is impossible to tell

which are night-moths

and which are stars

August 18^th 2011

on my back, nightswimming no. 2

Pinned to the water

at precise points along the bone,

and strung with threads (whisper-thin

but trembling with the night’s strength)

that disappear into the impossible above,

my fingers are uncurled one by one,

my arms drawn out and up in a slow

gymnast’s bow, my spine tautened

with a tension at the crown, my feet

tugged by the toes, one by one,

and my legs pulled apart by the heels,

and I am pinioned into their

perfect puppet-star.