Pond Cleaning
Here there is everything to do.
Spring, coming late, writes hurried lists
its ‘to do’s’ italicised in slanting shoots
leaning out towards returning light.
The heron has come back, a shrugged shadow
over the netted pond. The fish are replete with winter sleep.
Heavy-still with darkness, they tremble briefly.
We draw back the net, push the urgent yellows of king cups
back through, straighten buckled iris swords. Prepare to clean.
Then we see the frogs. The periscope eyes, a slow surfacing
into enemy lines, then the first low volley of lust’s beat.
They swell into a timpani. One note suffices.
In abstracted silence they stare golden-eyed, ‘in flagrante’,
but already beyond the cold heat
that dragged their moist bodies across roads, across gravel
to this embrace.
I feel their cold upon my lips: an absence of princes
the indifference of frogs.
- Andrea Porter & Heather Taylor
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- David Herd & Sarah Vap*
- David Tait & Kay Syrad
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- Fergus Allen & Stephanie Bolster
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- Jared Stanley & Siddhartha Bose*
- Jennifer Wainwright & Loveday Why
- Kirsty Logan & George Ttoouli
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- Rebecca Farmer & Jane Griffiths
- Robert Selby & Catherine Theis*
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- Simon Smith & Ryan Murphy
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- Tim Atkins & Jeremy Over
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- Zoƫ Brigley & Meredith Andrea



