A Poem by David Solway

AEGEAN

In certain lakes an inch is twenty feet.
The fish beneath their camouflage of scum
confirm their Darwin undistractedly;
snailshells sink into a fathomless abyss
though crunching underfoot, and pebbles fall
and fall into that murky shallowness
there's no getting to the bottom of.

The sea is no less clear for being deep,
twenty feet's an inch. The studded urchin
zooms it bony colors to the eye and
every pebble slingshots into prominence;
the distant fish so near they make the sea
intelligible, or flash like metaphors
discretely intimate, endlessly approaching.

~from his book, Mephistopheles and the Astronaut