TROPICAL AQUARIUM

The twisted many ribbons, the absurd
flexes of small and coloured flesh, alive
but marginal in error; the web-stirred
weave of a tiny spectrum: though I gave
a home of delicate green hair, of wet
warm growing little forest, now upon
a choking emptiness they writhe and beat,
dying of air on the November stone.

Young and inordinate and gauche, an arm
brought diamonding down that measured thing:
they know dimensions now that are not warm,
those pained sick projectiles.  In the wrong 
cold and excess and lack, in the mad space,
they die of being taught - by accident
of being taught - whose logic of light grace
had been a closed unseason sunned through flint.

They will not be a poem now again:
the amnion is broken.  Though a child
is building-up the common double pain,
it will not be those children (for the sealed 
thought was not sterile) but a spawn of things
tided, with young legs, on a desperate rim.
Must I be glad, having seen them lose the wings
that swam with rainbows, rainbows floating: them?