Chance

The haunted pool harbours 
three cautionary cones --
ditched, Dayglo-red and white --
a drowned coven's headgear.

The mind has moists like this:
rum-coloured, invalid,
marooned among fletched reeds,
where pallid tubers gulp
under ripe scum -- the fingerless
embryos of dark uncertainties.

Morning after morning
the canny vixen avoids them.
Shady lady in furs,
her neck-hair fuming with lice,
she circles to the mainstream
and drinks the send of light
from bulging vertebrate water,
its chance, anticipated tongue
cold in her nostrils.

And where her muzzle plunges,
pebbles skitter like dice.