CANALS

Under the watchful half-eye of a crescent moon -
fox-holes soiled up in winter's disrepair,
scraps of feather, bones decaying in the hedgerows -
the water's lit, a lunar aluminium,
and bottlenecks towards the bridge
where, flowing through the darkness,
it emerges to a bankside, draining out.

Boats bob, dog-dirt rots on paths.
Here's terminus, a hectare of hardening sludge
as February, March commingle, and the diminishing stretch
of canal's exhibited for all the sorry mud-and-garbage it's become.
Midge-infested, coffin-black, the mouth of muck is speckled with coke-cans.
Redundant limbs of old machinery clog up as broken glass and plastic bags
waste away, as if the whole inflated blotch, a muddy microcosm
were some big bin.

HERON, ROCHDALE CANAL

At a distance on this Sunday afternoon,
you're eyebrow-fine in river mist,
cut sharp and almost one-
dimensional;

as though your wafer-thinness
were a cloak,
a winter pelt,
or as when our insides
are x-rayed onto screens
or analysed through samples,
charts and graphs,
we see ourselves reduced to DNA,
our blood and bones
blackboarded in a squiggled jumble,
technologically transfigured, gridded,
a dot-to-dot re-focusing,
like some complicated, simple mathematical joke.

Perhaps this wraithlike sillhouette,
this flickered implication's
how we look, framed
through avian eyes,
or when offering a thread,
our shadowed selves concealed,
in office, waiting room, field, or home,
when money, faith, or love's set down
and bartered over.
Ours is a world of angles, shades,
of outlines, and beyond them, other outlines tapering
to far horizons.

ABOVE THE CANAL AT HEBDEN BRIDGE

The canal, a pewter moonbeam ribboning the town, is silent:

a sleeping sheep, it radiates
a silvered calm, beaded by bobbing
boats of blue and bushy green.

The barges may as well be lily-pads,
the unobtrusive rectangle of water
one of many stitched into a twined bone-structure

rimming parks and pathways,
soft like settling snow - canals endure
seemingly unendingly and simple,

a stark reciprocity of gains,
un-squeezed harvest of persistent peace,
a long rain-coloured corridor

no longer used for coal or sacks of grain,
but resurrected from the slimiest demise
by holiday-and-home-makers, their boats

like tubes of childhood sweets
bobblingly slotted along waters
self-evidently tinselling a round, echoic course.

Shy relations of aggressive seas,
genteel cousins of the rivers,
unselfconscious and subdued, reassuringly straightforward:

in a world of continual uncertainties, canals are rare constants.