Eight words, and not one of them is a verb. Michael John Pickering's "Fountain" is a single fragment, a stack of descriptions in which nothing happens grammatically, and that is the point. A fountain is a strange kind of event: it never stops moving, yet it looks the same from one hour to the next. By withholding any verb, the poem lets that paradox sit in the sentence itself. The water pours, but the language holds still.
The first line is the most playful. "Pouting" suits a fountain neatly, since water pushes out of a spout the way lips push out in a sulk, and the word seems to blend "pouring" with "spouting". The poem suggests a figure, perhaps a sculpted one, with its mouth permanently pursed. "For always" is a child's phrase where "forever" would be the grown-up one, and it deepens the petulant tone. This pout is no passing mood but a fixed expression. The mouth is built into the sound, too. The p of "pouting" and the p and b of "imperturbable" are lip-closing consonants, and you have to purse your lips to say them.
"Imperturbable" is the longest word in the poem, and it gets a line to itself. To perturb is to disturb or unsettle, so the word is a small joke when applied to something made of churning water. Water is endlessly disturbed, yet whatever carries it stays calm. The five syllables stretch the line out, so reading the word takes a moment of the stillness it describes. It can describe the face, composed and unbothered by its own sulk, or it can describe the whole fountain, which keeps its shape however much liquid rushes through.
The third line asks for a small note. As printed, it reads "acqeous", which looks like a slip for "aqueous", and the sense, "watery", is clear either way. The phrase "aqueous angel" is ambiguous in a useful way. The angel might be the figure holding the water, or it might be the water itself, shaped into something heavenly. Either reading turns an everyday object into a visitor from somewhere higher. The sounds help. "Angel's", "silver" and "song" all carry soft s sounds, which hiss and shimmer like spray. After the hard lip-sounds of the opening, the poem seems to loosen into liquid.
"Silver" does two jobs at once. It is the colour of sunlit spray, but it is also a word we use for clear, bright sounds, so the song can be seen as well as heard. The poem ends on "song", the one thing a fountain actually does besides fall. Here the pout opens and the sulking figure sings.
The construction is tight. Counting "aqueous" as three syllables, the lines run five, five, five and then three. The pattern settles into a steady beat and then drops away on the short last line, like a spout dwindling or a note fading. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the only punctuation is the apostrophe and the full stop at the very end. With no commas to interrupt, the words run on like a stream, and the single full stop acts as the basin that catches them.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. In eight words it holds comedy (the pout), calm (the imperturbability), the sacred (the angel) and music (the song), and it lets them sit together without choosing among them. It also makes a quiet argument about attention. A fountain is something most people walk past, and the poem asks us to stand still long enough to see that its permanence is made of constant movement, and that its sulk and its song may be the same gesture.