In the sea-seasoned black
timber:
furrows deep as a miner’s
worry
and a hole. Round this
orifice
you can make out a face,
a peaty
offering, leathery,
garrotted.
The tide returns many
intricacies:
a cuttle-bone like a
Celtic spatula;
in its fine cracks thin
algal greens,
and here you can see a
face also,
long-haired and dour,
druid-white.
In shell spirals, ridged
and noduled,
old homes of the sea’s
hiders, reticence,
you can make out
villagers gathered
around a victim. We throw
history away
but it’s saved in the
sea’s scriptoria.
And the book of the past
washes up:
covers eroded, the
ciphers split,
the illuminated capitals
leached. The mind’s
trove of corpse-leakage
comes washing up
and whelks the eye
through which we study Now.
