Classic Poem

White on dark water, so stark
I leave my binoculars behind
and watch with bare red eyes
two swans, taut with sexuality,
stretching their necks
alternately side by side.

They are early: colour is
still to come to bone-dry rushes
and trees bank black strangling

their green. It is a hard wedding:
sharp brambles and ivy-covered
stumps hunch and hug;

sleet pokes the surface from
a blank neutrality, to come back
spitting with all its mouths.

Roused, the spread wings
beat their own storm towards
the north, wind against wind.

Somewhere in all this a small
heat is held, like the hope
of a cold man drowning.