Once a day the rocks, with little warning—

not much looked for even by the spruce 

and fir ever at attention above—

fetch up on these tidal flats and bars.

Large. crate-like rocks, wrapped in kelp; 

layer on imprinted layer,

umber to claret to olivegreen

of scalloped marbling. . . . 

Not far along the path of obstacles 

and stepping stones considered,

fluid skeins of bladder wrack 

lie tufted over the mussel shoals— 

the seabed black as a shag's neck, 

a half-acre coalfield, but alive. 

Recklessly multiple, myriads compact, 

the small airtight coffers (in chipped enamel) 

are starred over with bonelike barnacles 

that crackle and simmer throughout the trek, 

gravel-crepitant underfoot. 



Evening comes now not with the Evening

Star, but with a breathing fog. 

And fog is the element here, 

a new term, vast by indefinition, 

a vagrant damping of the deep tones 

of skies and bars and sea. 

Sand, mud, sand, rock; one jagged pool 

basining a water invisible

except as quick trembles 

over algal weed—itself 

half-absent, a virid gel. 



Walking means to lose the way 

in fog, the eye drawn out to a farther point,

a dark graph on the faint blue inlet watershine; 

out to where a heron stands, 

stationing its sharp silhouette 

against the fogbright dusk. 

Then, not to be approached, 

lifts off and rows upward, up, up,

a flexible embracing-forward on the air, 

rising out of view 

behind an opaque expanse of calcium flame.



The great kelp-dripping rocks, 

at random positions,

lost in thought and dematerializing 

with the gray hour,

release, indelibly, their pent-up contents. 

—Even the scattered feathers here 

are petrified, limewhite blades and stony down. 

The sky, from eastward, deepens 

with the dawning insight 

as the seas begin to rise, the flats 

slide away, the hulls bear off the ground,

and the eye alien to so self-sufficing 

a tidal system turns and takes up how to 

retrace the steps that brought it there.