Disappeared

In the cyan-blue ebb-lane of shore-shimmering light

Kids splash-kick the safe shallows into glass shivers.

Three tanned archaeologists caress sea-washed stones;

One thinks the pile might be ballast shingle lost from

a lone storm-dashed doomsday-driven Armada ship.

In the rolling fields they ploughed the potatoes out;

Pickers with buckets went up the rows filling sacks.

They threw away the ungirt sag-bags of squashed rot.

The moist pulp disappeared into the muddiness.

In the low damp dip the clay-clung potatoes had

to be scraped pink-skin clean from their cloggy cocoons.

In the marsh between the potato field and the river,

they found a ‘disappeared’ - his humanity burst

like a last-breath bubble on still bog-pool water;

In the hotel a country-and-western band plays;

The sun gashes red the wisps of white clouds curling

across the tug-boat moon that hauls the drifting tide.

The river eddies eat its bed and sides, rotate

pebbles in a vortex, and pukes them on the beach.

Spiders’ webs thread a white sheet on the grassy drills.