Tomorrow may dawn fine.

Indoors, insipid fruit is out of season,
the flowers are forced and dyed;
the dye comes out in water.

Outside, seems far more natural.
I walk beyond the field of garlic
where children camp in summer

to rocks that strew a mini valley,
think how beautiful they are -
like viruses enlarged.
An infestation of a sort, perhaps.
I quite expect
to see them crawl away
in much the way that Paul Klee saw
aquatic stones take life.*

Between them, tiny rivulets
are tainted through the same unease.
The whole of nature
shares their question mark.

From here I take a chalk path
down the steep escarpment -
treacherous when wet,
but worn so much and wearing out
that even dry I slide.

The scenery has changed.
A river runs where man has merged
his blocks of concrete with the rocks
in blissful ignorance
of what the world has lost.
The tiddlers that I caught in childhood
are mostly floating dead.

I watch an artist load his brush -
leaf green and umber side by side -
to represent the river bank.
He does it with a single, brash
encounter. Masterly -
but could as well be some impurity.

*This in the Naples Aquarium: he watched forms apparently metamorphose between the various forms - animal, mineral and vegetable.