Surgeon

He swims just before dawn, breasting the river
like a hill, parting it with his arms like a dancer
or priest. Ahead, a flat line of light divides
the two dark halves of the world from each other.

The air leans up to his face and with his ears only
he senses the dark landscape of the water,
its prostrate fields and struggling hedges,
its low-lying ridges and flooded verges.

Below the surface pearls of half-light, silver
with oxygen, cling like prayer beads to his fingers.
He is thinking about the anatomy of the heart,
the forks in the road, the red caves and narrow lanes

and on the horizon the possibility of a cathedral,
the sun rising like a corpuscle, winter wheat.