Monhegan
Every year go down to the sea,
down to the sea to Monhegan, drawn like me
to the conflict of sea meeting headland,
the highest headlands on the eastern seaboard, where Bartolomew Gosnold
in 1605 first met the mysterious natives fishing in their shallops,
who “spake well” with him in English.

Go to drink inspiration among the ghosts
of an elderly American painterly imagination
that turned to the beauty that had been sundered
and said, “Forgive me,” and tenderly devoted themselves
to saving what they could see.
Some to come here to the New England Polynesia,
where you could go native in slickers and there be no consequence.
As in physics they discovered it is possible to make visual elemental awareness,
which of course is what they passed onto Pollack and them.
Salt makes everything new again.

The island is shaped like a whale being blown inland.
The sea storms all winter long,
throwing back the trees edging ever closer in their dumb way
to the cracking the cliffs of forever.
Roughing it up the paths too many tourists have trod into the ground,
deepening the troughs till they flood down,
they come for the birds who come earlier every year,
on their stopover from Brazil, less and less every spring.
“Tut, tut,” is it the end of the world? So it goes at the dinner table.

Come for the salt and the spray and the gurgle and grind of silence,
the sea-water, being like blood, coming every third wave luckily,
luckily, on its way to either high or low-tide.