the centres
travel with us unseen
like our shadows
on a day when there is no sun.
We must move back:
there are too many foregrounds.
Now, clutter of twigs
across our eyes, tatter
of birds at the eye’s edge; the straggle
of dead treetrunks; patch
of lichen
and in love, tangle
of limbs and fingers, the texture
of pores and lines on the skin.
vii
An other sense tugs at us:
we have lost something,
some key to these things
which must be writings
and are locked against us
or perhaps (like a potential
mine, unknown vein
of metal in the rock)
something not lost or hidden
but just not found yet
that informs, holds together
this confusion, this largeness
and dissolving:
not above or behind
or within it, but one
with it: an
identity:
something too huge and simple
for us to see.
The Explorers
The explorers will come
in several minutes
and find this island.
(It is a stunted island,
rocky, with room
for only a few trees, a thin
layer of soil; hardly
bigger than a bed.
That is how
they’ve missed it
until now)
Already their boats draw near,
their flags flutter,
their oars push at the water.
They will be jubilant
and shout, at finding
that there was something
they had not found before,
although this island will afford
not much more than a foothold:
little to explore;
but they will be surprised
we know they must be
coming, because they always come
several minutes too late)
(they won’t be able
to tell how long
we were cast away, or why,
or, from these
gnawed bones,
which was the survivor)
at the two skeletons
The Settlers
A second after
the first boat touched the shore,
there was a quick skirmish
brief as a twinge
and then the land was settled
(of course there was really
no shore: the water turned
to land by having
objects in it: caught and kept
from surge, made
less than immense
by networks of
roads and grids of fences)
and as for us, who drifted
picked by the sharks
during so many bluegreen
centuries before they came:
they found us
inland, stranded
on a ridge of bedrock,
defining our own island.
From our inarticulate
skeleton (so
intermixed, one
carcass),
they postulated wolves.
They dug us down
into the solid granite
where our bones grew flesh again,
came up trees and
grass.
Still
we are the salt
seas that uphold these lands.
Now horses graze
inside this fence of ribs, and
children run, with green
smiles, (not knowing
where) across
the fields of our open hands.