Flood

Flood

(Written in the Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons, London)

This is the ark

With half its inhabitants

Missing; the animals

Entering one by one,

And asked to remove

Their coats at the door.

Only the ugliest have

Been invited – the rare,

The strange; those

Robed in disease, or

Draped in polyps.

Here, the imperfect are

Grouped like superheroes:

A duck with four legs;

A foetal calf, its mandible

Eating its own maxilla;

A faceless puppy

Wrinkling its existence

From inside a tube.

Elsewhere, the spinal cord

Of a minke whale

Reminds me of a bell rope.

A mammary reservoir

Is pinned and splayed

Like a treasure map.

The tongue of a wildebeest:

A hitch-hiker’s thumb.

Finally I come

To the unbirthed babies.

Suspended in liquid,

Small face serious,

This one is Confucius.

This one is an alien.

This one is carved from soap.

Somewhere inside me

A tide is rising. Brain

Flooded with images

I leave the museum –

Imagination now stranded

On a higher peak.