Tas In March

White on dark water, so stark I leave my binoculars behind and watch with bare red eyes two swans, taut with sexuality, stretching their necks alternately side by side. They are early: colour is still to come to bone-dry rushes and trees bank black strangling their green. It is a hard wedding: sharp brambles and ivy-covered stumps hunch and hug; sleet pokes the surface from a blank neutrality, to come back spitting with all its mouths. Roused, the spread wings beat their own storm towards the north, wind against wind. Somewhere in all this a small heat is held, like the hope of a cold man drowning.