Four Poems

The Slate Ship

A spacious case
of temperate air
and this child's slate.
Six hundred years

lost from sight
in riverbed sludge,
then raised and perched
on a plastic pad.

In the mangled rig
and wonky mast
I imagine the frown
of the baffled artist.

In lightning slashes
dragged through it all,
I see the scorn
...