An Island
–ending almost with a phrase spoken by Keats, from Cowden Clarke’s remembrances
Toward the end of the island
(a tapered
spit of sand
and ocean cusp),
I heard a bell
(a bird,
it turned out), almost as I’d heard
once, a crisp
anvil-struck knell
come from the next town over
when someone (I figured) had died
and, hip to hip,
friends must have lined benches
(salvaged from an Erie ship
foundered in the century before the last.
Sonar first described the mast
and, later, I saw a liminal
pan of the crustaceous bolts dwindled
along its side
— it was on the news
and in the papers).
Sitting like birds, they sang
(though, not like birds), haunches,
almost touching, the smart clang
out of the cupola
above the pews,
the hymnals
in each hand lit hard from the big window,
and a troop of creatures floating in the ray
going every which way,
(unlike the bubbles
of the diver)
…this way and that, and every which way.
