in a house with a small body of water
A feathering of smoke won’t reach
the jacarandas above, whose cool fronds
darken the surface of the pond by my feet.
The water’s edge has no creases—a perfect image;
its imperfect object—a reflection sharpened
by the shade increases the resolution, the depth,
the secret. Still water is mostly made up of sky, the rest
more sky, where I conceal my likeness.
In this too-close air, I watch a tailless lizard
on a stone wall, a blade of sunlight
resting along its spine.
My amenities have turned rank
and file—black coffee, a single cube of sugar,
unburnt loose tobacco, orange and almond cake
crumbs falling from my beard
like bougainvillea over the arch by the veranda,
where the rotary phone never rings. Before abandon,
the body bargains with itself
what it thinks it can do without.
Cuckoos sing to one another in this small body
of water, the telephone cables stretching from bank
to bank, lost in these lines of communication,
where nothing begins, merely reflects
into oblivion. Whose tail was I once? An answer—
to reach down into the sky, like a man
sifting the riverbed for precious stones,
to find the bottom with the water level
only at my elbow, and a detonation
of bright red fuchsias. Is all that is good
a casualty before it becomes a virtue?
What is left—this asylum,
my instrument, this crown of evening light?
Notes:
This poem is part of the folio “Freed Verse: A Reckoning of Black British Poets.” Read the rest of the folio in the September 2025 issue.
Source: Poetry (September 2025)