Corrugated Watertank

WATERTANK

A corrugated-iron watertank is unlike a beach
of sand where the tide has rippled up the skin,
for the galvanising breaks up the light in shards
like a platoon of silver-curved swords thrust out
above inside shadow, each glint of light on edge
is sharp as the dry dapples that hold the water in
strengthening the arm of the arc of flow-through
as the metal swings its left hook and its right to
join hands in the victory drink on the other side.

The gradually diminishing dull-echoed rungs were
the grim ladder rungs with which our grandparents
climbed up out of the droughts of summers past
each pewter-coin circle of stored rainwater a pool
of common use to be meted out by a careful glass
so even a dish of washwater carried splashless out
was lipped across a lettuce patch as dose in salve
for green stuff in the palate, it rung of no idle cream
familiar of beaches: frugal priority had real draught.