Obvious, isn’t it – the Thames
as a snake? Yet, it sloughed off terraces
as it side-wound southwards, left us

the odd cast of an out-grown loop.
Through the Pleistocene it twisted
deranged, as if struck by a poet’s block –

it unlocked jaws for the drowning
rats of its estuary. It sleeps now
in mid-digestion. Essex ploughs on,

puts down its asphalt slug-tracks.
A 747 passes low, blushed by sunset,
vulnerable as an upturned frog –

and now and then an old man turns
in his allotment a devil’s toenail
or into a nest of pebbles there pushes

a pale mammal pink – the real-time
of a child’s fingers, who kneels
and fearlessly steals one cold egg.