The Cabbageness of Things

In the cabbageness of things, just out of reach,
a cabbage in an armchair sits on a beach
with a meerschaum pipe, which he cautiously sips,
while bubbles, not smoke, seep from his lips.

The bubbles float up, and are pecked by birds,
and as each bubble bursts, out tumble words
which together form clues to the mysteries of life,
but they’re grabbed, as they fall, by a greengrocer’s wife
who bags them and keeps them to cook as a stew,
which she gives, every morning, for the cabbage to chew,
who grinds them up slowly, those secrets of life,
so they end up as fragments in the meerschaum pipe
of the cabbage on the beach, who fitfully sings,
in a murmuring voice, of the cabbageness of things.