Alan Magee has piled ten stones

Kirsten Ratza

in a tide pool, as if to bolt the water
down. Is it that he’s afraid

of space? Or the dull shades
that lurk where there’s no light,

the crevices where nothing has no
no? (and where I can’t follow).

Knowing Alan as I’d like to,
paint is just his way

of preventing escape. It’s simple,
he’d say—you’re a body, quaking

on the shore, a skeleton among
the succulents (oh, Alan, never a botanist)—

let me interject.

It’s not the body that threatens to go—
nothing so carefully planned—instead

it’s the shadow
of the one cheeky fish (say, minnow),

who rises up between rocks,
so real he’s best left invisible,

who darts from gray to gray-er,
then dives motionlessly into –est.