No colour of weak tea. No rushing spate
like a conveyor belt of cobbled streets.
No acrid stench of piss under the bridges.
Instead it’s flat as a mirrored floor, slow
as end credits, dark as a Peugeot’s tinted-glass
in a car park’s shade. Then it’s the sky’s
chameleon, pink through red to mauve.
Now, midges move over its surface like flies
around a horse’s flank. Propeller-engined
dragonfly, a heron’s awkwardness, bulrush,
pondweed like tangled cables, hyacinth
like something you’ve forgotten that you knew.
William Thompson is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol. Born in Cambridgeshire in 1991, his work has appeared in Wild Court, The Honest Ulsterman, Raceme, Lighthouse, New Critique and The Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-21 (Black Spring).
More work by William Thompson
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