All of Us There

For Polly Devlin

‘Signatures of all things we read’;
In a blaze of identity
We scrawled our names,
Poets had plenty of paper.
Indicting the snow of space
In which, islanded,
The verses are
Black boxes in a white sea

Opened like a piano;
Da da da da da da da da da da da da da dee
That was poems,
And funny words like de la Mare
Sea, horse
(Drawing a chariot for the sea god).
The fancy stuff came later,
We had signed on.

White could not be white again
Nor could silence be commanded.
It was only a matter of time and loss
Before we took to the water.
Like dogs or horses yoked to retrieval
Who damn near choke before fetching up,
Frozen, heartscaled, on dry land.
The word out, the island seems like home.