Contradicting a proverb, the pot
I am watching boils, and resembles
the pool beneath a waterfall.
Then I pour in the frozen peas,
an avalanche of green stones, and at
that the pan no longer trembles.
For a while the peas lie as still
as the stony floor of the sea,
or else like a mountain of skulls
in South East Asia; they wait as
rigidly as an audience
with numbered seats, afraid to move.
Then one pea, on an odd impulse,
breaks away, and, with a skater’s
motion from side to side, ascends
to ride the surface far above
the others, a non-conformist
with a notion all its own.
Another, hesitant at first, glides
up to join it, and others still,
one at a time, cannot resist
the temptation to follow on,
behind the first one who derides
the common and conventional.
And then it is clear there’s a trend,
and all those peas who had hung back
now clamour to be allowed in.
Anxiously they jostle and sprint,
needing to belong in the end
among the upward-mobile pack,
elbowing each other, crowding
up to the air which smells of mint.