Weeping In Front of Ducks

In Jephson Gardens on a spry spring day
I wept in front of ducks
And as I wept the scene of sobs
Embroidered a stillness so impeccable
The council must inspect it twice a week.
The air was motionless around my face
Because all the breeze was in the trees
And before me the cool of the pool
Was gently lapped
By the foot of a coot.

Behind me stood the wrought iron gates
Behind them the busy world pumped like a duodenum
But here the air smelled of glass
And the grass was clean
And the soil had not a stain on its character.
The tulips met my crying eyes
Like anaesthetists, proferring
A sterile vacuum in which to bleed.

I couldn’t hack the job and so I left
But really it was the imagined vista of nothing
Spreading before me which inspired me,
A fissure in the earth predestining decline and fall.
Failure feels a way into the cracks in fragile brains,
Flaking chunks away like cold poached salmon,
But visions like this come and go
And flow away in rivulets
Like ink wash on inscribed wax,
While somewhere in the distance
A duck quacks.

Tears without hugs
Tears and nothing
Only ducks
Tickling a smile across a reluctant face
And doing a certain amount of waddling.

I decided to bugger off.
I left my bench and set off into town.
I passed the summer pavilion where,
On a manicured July day eight years ago,
A good friend married, I recall,
A rather high maintenance woman
A marriage which wasn’t set to last.

But then, we all saw that one coming.