To The Islands

I will use the sound of wind and the splash of the cormorant diving and the music any boatman will hear in the running threads as they sing about leaving for the Islands. I will use a sinker’s zinc arpeggio as it rolls across a wooden jetty and the sound of crabs in the shifting gravel and the scrape of awls across the hulls of yachts. I will use the wash-board chorus of the sea and the boats and the skiffler’s skirl of tide-steered surf taken out by the wind through the cliffs. Look—I don’t know much about how to reach the Islands, only what I’ve heard from the boatman’s song and from a man who walked the headland to find a place in the rocks free of salt and osprey. But perhaps I can use the bladder-wrack and barnacle, the gull wafting above the mussels and the bird diving back to sea. Perhaps I can use the song sponge divers sing to time each dive and then use their gasps as they lift their bags onto the skiffs. Perhaps the seapool whispers of the sun-downers or the terns above the harbour are what the divers sing to as they hold their breath and swim the silent minutes through with prayer. I will use the gull’s height and the limpet’s splash and the wasps’ nest hanging like a paper lamp under the pier and the little boat sailing out. Even the fishermen lugging shoals over the stones, even the sailors shift-walking the decks, even the end-blown note of a shell leveled towards the horizon. I will use the eagle’s flight moored in the eyes of children and the voices of men, the ones, they say, who’ve made it, though perhaps the purlin creaking on its rafter, the gull squawking from the jetty, the wind calling along the moorings and the notes the divers hear in the quiet waters of their breathing as they seek release through depths are all I’ll, know about finding the Islands. Meanwhile, I’ll use the sound of sunlight filling the sponges and a diver’s saturated breathing in the lungs of an oarsman rowing weightless cargo over the reefs.