A Football in Louth Canal
It’s netted in some dried-out thistles
on a curve a mile from Alvingham
(where, on a lucky day, your eye’s
caught by a soundless, petrol blue
explosion on a split-trunked willow
you weren’t looking at and drawn along
a kingfisher’s long beam of flight
a rush’s height above the water
till boughs lean and complicate
what you can see). Three swans coast
by, the dusky whites of feathers
and football and three
orange beaks incongruous
in ploughed-over January.
The thistly lobster-pot it’s in won’t
let it go, despite its bobbing
at the spars. Someone’s swishing stick will
soon relaunch it on its unintended
course between these owl-scoured fringes
of flat fields out to the marsh – unless
it’s left, and leaving sets it free.
Page(s) 20
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