Waking in Picardy

starts with lost, intangible
sleep; the sputter of rooks over
orchards, their flaked black grief

ascending; a wood pigeon crooning
wet-throated under sky's
fallen slip of apricot grey.

Then the sputtering engine
of a wood wasp, tipsy at fallen
plums; five lizards creeping onto

stone, redeemed from cold cracks
in the garden wall to sun spots
where heat adores them. A

blackbird's cadenza, a
flycatcher's figures of eight;
the mind tilted into day

and washed with light.
Over the pond's virulent acne
of weed house martins stutter -

tics of air's limpid integument -
damselflies glisten, sex to sex
promiscuously winged.

A water hen scolds her chicks
from the black/gold eyeslits of
pike sunk into green, camouflaged

in striped, eternal patience;
their sag-belly grins hatch under
clouded water, below the bloomed

skin of wakefulness, beneath a
ripening day's vast dream where
the dead still reach for us.