I was chasing a fugitive thought that I thought that I had had during my swim.  I could not remember if it was a real thought (something usable) or just a vague direction.  I could not remember topic, subject or depth.  Just a vague feeling that something which might have been was now consigned to not at all.  That doesn't stop you make a desultory sort of attempt to trawl through closed memories hoping that something magical will happen.  Well, it didn't and whatever apercu I did have will have to remain a lost treasure!
     But I wrote a few scrawls about the loss and found myself trying to make something of the negation, so to speak.  Then the memory of 'fishing' in Roath Park came back to me and a few jotted lines later the title, encapsulating another memory, was written down and soon I had enough to persuade myself that the lost memory had prompted something constructive after all!
     The title seems to promise that the following poem will be something like one of Aesop's Fables - as it happens, the poem is not like a fable, but the concept that an approachable story might contain a thought is one that I think is appropriate.
     I think this poem is about something like intellectual responsibility and an acceptance that new information might disrupt previously held assumptions.
     By the way, the dog's name was Penny and she was one of those dogs who spoils you for any future canine interloper for your affections!

The Rabbit Who Sat & Stared

Ideas breed elusiveness –

so you’re ashamed to say.

Sometimes they watch you

watching: hiding in full sight.

           

            They’re like those

tiddlers in the curving stream in

Roath Park’s wildest part:

there, and not there – some sort of

thought experiment protected

by refraction. 

                        And the clumsy

hands of childhood stayed by

what-if-I-do-catch-them – then, what then?

           

            Or like our dog. 

High strung and Labrador and spoilt. 

Who chasing a wild rabbit,

just before it slipped

into the longer grass, it stopped

and turned and sat and stared

at our brave hound,

                       

                        who promptly

ricocheted away, angle obtuse,

and sniffed and snuffled grass

ten safe feet far from

that unmoving thing.

Ideas glare you out, defying

the intentions that you thought you had.

Protected by an obviousness

that you so rarely see.

As it happens I did catch (once, and only once) a tiddler in the Park stream and put it in a jam jar and took it home.  It was dead within an hour or so.  I realise now that the care that I took over it: giving it a clean jar and fresh, clean, cold water from the tap was exactly the environment that the poor fish did not want after its muddy, vegetation filled original home.

     I would like to say that this death had a profound effect on me.  But it didn't.  I went out into the back yard and played in my wigwam and all, as far as I was concerned, was well with the world.