POND Eventually water, having been possessed by every verb -- been rush been drip been geyser eddy fountain rapid drunk evaporated frozen pissed transpired -- will fall into itself and sit. Pond. Things touch or splash down and it takes them in -- pollen, heron, leaves, larvae, greater and lesser scaup -- nothing declined, nothing carried briskly off to form alluvium somewhere else. Pond gazes into sky religiously but also gathers in its edge, reflecting cattails, alders, reed beds and behind them, ranged like taller children in the grade four photo, conifers and birch. All of them inverted, carried deeper into sepia, we might as well say pondered. For pond is not pool, whose clarity is edgeless and whose emptiness, beloved by poets and the moon, permits us to imagine life without the accident- prone plumbing of its ecosystems. No, the pause of pond is gravid and its wealth a naturally occurring soup. It thickens up with spawn and algae, while, on its surface, stirred by every whim of wind, it translates air as texture -- mottled, moiré, pleated, shirred or seersuckered in that momentary ecstasy from which impressionism, like a bridesmaid, steps.

When it rains it winks, then puckers up all over, then, moving two more inches into metamorphosis, shudders into pelt. Suppose Narcissus were to find a nice brown pond to gaze in: would the course of self-love run so smooth with that exquisite face rendered in bruin undertone, shaken, and floated in the murk between the deep sky and the ooze?.