Nobody comes up from the sea as late as this
in the day and the season, and nobody else goes down
the last steep kilometre, wet-metalled where
a shower passed shredding the light which keeps
pouring out of its tank in the sky, through summits,
trees, vapours thickening and thinning. Too
credibly by half celestial, the dammed
reservoir up there keeps emptying while the light lasts
over the sea where ‘it gathers the gold against
it’. The light is bits of crushed rock randomly
glinting underfoot, wetted by the short
shower, and down you go and so in its way does
the sun which gets there first. Boys, two of them,
turn campfirelit faces, a hesitancy to speak
is a hesitancy of the earth rolling back and away
behind this man going down to the sea with a bag
to pick mussels, having an arrangement with the tide,
the ocean to be shallowed three point seven meters,
one hour’s light to be left, and there’s the excrescent
moon sponging off the last of it. A door
slams, a heavy wave, a door, the sea-floor shudders.
Down you go alone, so late, into the surge-black
fissure.
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