INVISIBLE ISLAND

                                            INVISIBLE ISLAND

(The island I used as my model is The Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England.)


No prospect to be seen on days like this
But a smooth continuous dark rim
Skimming between the white-misty distances
Of the sky and the pale submissive sea.
The flawless airy dome aloft
Uneasily reflected by the blotched and pitted surface
Like a skin soon to be sloughed
Every lea
Crammed with salty wrinkles.


Down in the watery lucent green below
Are sifting fingers of reticulated light
And dark and living shapes that slip from sight
Beneath the currents' patterned flight
Etched twice a day in sea-ink on the tidal sand.

Seen or unseen, Wight's
Vast wind-woeful hand
Must still betide this shore
From the eponymous hills down to the ocean floor
Invisible, unheeded
But the shaper of this strand.

MELUSINE