Water

Water, by Alan Franks

Winner of the Southport International Poetry Competition

I wonder when the plain taste of this water

Will pass for the last time, not to repeat itself,

And the glass tumbler will finally leave

My lips unparted by its heavy rim.

 

Forty years since he went without a word,

Collapsing in a startled stranger’s arms,

The appearance of comedy played out on a platform

Of the station in a northern conference town.

 

I wonder when I will fold away the letter,

The one he must have sent that autumn morning

And which arrived the day after I heard

From the modern but still inadequate headmaster.

 

Forty days of shock, said my mother’s doctor,

Take a couple of these last thing at night.

I wonder when the plain taste of this water

Will pass for the last time, not to repeat itself.

 

Drinking and drying have their own convergence,

Making current shapes which shed their forms.

At every drought the spires of rubble show

From the small town which the reservoir overran.

 

I wonder when the uncovering of sadness

Will break its habit of bringing into range

A shallow dish of something slurping sideways

And the clunk of cutlery on refectory wood.

 

Time out of town still wears its blameless face

As sheep sharpen the crescent blade of the hill

And headwaters muster underneath the ground

And streams shift slowly into stone.

 

In the pavement puddle almost as thin

As the skin on a cup of tea the petrol rainbow

Is standing at my shoulder while the wobbly

Moonface waits and waits to recompose.

 

Salt and woodgrain, rain again and guttering,

Trees divesting, drain leaf litanies.

I wonder when the plain taste of this water

Will pass for the last time, not to repeat itself.