Convolvulus Poem by Giles Watson

The vale is wakening, but up here
the fringe of the downs skulks
under clouds. Butterflies sleep,
their vacant eyes jewelled with dew;
dark, uneven spots, deep beneath
the froth of compound lenses,
are strangely magnified. Grass
seems to breathe; stamens quake
on long, wet inflorescences,
and the bindweed, seeing its chance,
twines an extra inch. I am sucked
into its vortex, held between
the lips of sweating petals, licked
into a dreaming white oblivion,
and the complex, fleshy pistil
thrusts and divides in a hazed,
silk-veined interior so pure
it fades to green. From here
I go down into the xylem, phloem,
urgent stem and plunging root -
into the chalk that bore them -
into the eyes and groins and
pert nipples of urchin-fossils,
into the corals that flexed
sensitive tentacles with stinging
cells when the downland was
a reef, and the vale was sunk
and drowned.

And out of the thin
brown smattering of topsoil, I
marvel how orchids are made, how
the sainfoin masters strange
alchemies, and the restharrow
distils the earth to pinkness -
until the bindweed drags it down.

The clouds divide. I look up
from out of the flower's soft
orifice, half-choked, spluttering,
blinded by the sun.