Beside the Reservoir
by Philip Gross
from The Ice Factory,Faber

A surface still as marble. Drystone masonry
runs straight in, under. There is no other shore
but a thin brilliance of mist. One tree
stoops, waist-deep. At the small thud of a door

the gulls flush upwards briefly. By the car
two figures stand as if breath-taken. Once
they would have talked, talked, troubling to share
this luminous distance. Now, he points

to bird-flecks drifting far out: a precarious
species, winter visitors. She takes his arm,
keeps company, through certain silences
accepted like the need for water, for the drowned farm.