They share a bed like enemies at war,
a no-man’s-land exists between the sheets:
a barbed-wire bolster, strewn with years of hurt.

Sometimes, waking early, he lies listening
to the rhythm of her breathing.
She sighs, he yearns for peace.
She stirs; he half expects an armistice.

In vain hope, he crosses the border, takes her
in his arms. Her arms X’d across
her chest, she counters with cold words.
He’s in retreat to his side of the line.

Back to back, they’re drifting off to sleep.
He checks for casualties and thinks there’s none.
Close by, another fragment of her heart,
pierced by a barb, is dangling on the wire.

Sometime, astronomically soon,
our dying sun will swallow up this planet
and along with all that matter
will go all that mattered. . .

And scientists from a distant star
will probably observe our ending
and, if there isn’t too much news that day,
we'll get a casual mention on some sort of radio station,
after all the politics and just before the sport and weather,
from our science correspondent.

And some distant-star commuter,
stuck in inter-stellar traffic,
hearing of our final curtain,
may just look in our direction;
no, correction: ex-direction
and wonder if our lives were any better.

In tidying his garden shed he sweeps up
spiders’ webs without concern, like
so much dust and spiders too.

They wait for hours, patient as anglers,
their lines complex geometries of silk.
It takes a million years to get to this:
an hour to build a web that lasts a day;

With webs secure as safety-nets,
they lie in wait for acrobatic wasps to falter,
unsuspecting slap-stick moths to snag
their powder-wings on sticky silk…

He locks his shed.
Even as he’s walking down the path,
a ball of legs unfurls, fixes a line,
abseils down the window pane.

Day by day they glean more knowledge of their fishy world.

While the old philosophish still argue over watery definitions,
geolofish have dug deep down below the rotting leaf mould
and declare the world is made of shingle.

Meanwhile the astrophysifish have theories about
how it all began, Big Splash the main contender,
and speculate on whether there is life beyond the Pond.

But the frogs just laugh at all this. They know the delicate
taste of slugs and snails. On summer nights they sit
on stones to take the air and contemplate the stars.