The first transgressions have always occurred

In vehicles. Voyages emit new laws of the wind

Clothed in stolen gold—the hero beyond tragedy

Stands on the shore having discovered nothing.

Shield islands—plumes of headland nodding nearer

Farther off breaking coastline vanishing patternless

Into the present. Long shadows of oarstrokes never

To strike the horizon which ever smiled the same

Sad smile of the hand that believes it can calculate

Distance in clear intervening space. Pacifist isle

That invented the very idea of geometry—

—the first diagram whose angles haven’t yet

Disentangled violence from sight. Flowering stone.

Fluorescent time. Take this sea to be equal parts

Wedding march and funeral dirge. On days like this

It can feel as if the island vain in its entirety

Has ripped free in a storm of its moorings—

A postage stamp cut from its envelope to

Commemorate the astral transit from subatomic

Particle to the vast millimetres of microplastic

Oceans. Nothing for it but to drift like an

Anchor planted ceremoniously inland—and yet—

What choice in the land where equations

Governing fluids are more fundamental than

Quantum mechanics. When the most critical rate

Limiting factors are the speed and silence at which

                  you can slip through water—ave maris—. 
Must I make the same errors of modern legend—as

Crane took Copernicus to say—simply by sailing

in a new direction you could enlarge the world.

As though official buildings reserved the right to be

Shot towers from which lead is cast into and

Becomes the abyss. The sun sank its bridge and

Came straight back—the stars lean closer to see

Watershed waterlevels that are enough to set

Driftwood alight. The pain that was my wrists

Deep in Antarctic ice I thought the glass stem

Of gorse rigged into burning twine. And even just

Unfurling my palm—to lay flat my second nature’s

Fist—for five minutes has become a stretch.

You wouldn’t believe what controlling umbrellas

In the wind has done for my strength. In ice floes

Of traffic—my car of the future fitted with a snorkel

Staring up the threads of rain like gun barrels.

All of us in the ocean’s wake pining for the most

Alienating path home as though every lighthouse

A monument to who you were

                                                            not there for.