The Isthmus

Dismal, the abyssal depths speak soft to me,

And the wind makes waves of my locks: untethered,

This mortal plane has gifted me strange names,

Some, I can hardly remember and others,

I recall in the scent of the dunes, on a hot afternoon,

Or at the sight of an entangled cormorant, she was,

She was beyond my aid, a breath purloined without witness,

The whiteness of the foam, masking her decaying form,

And though I may arrange the bluets about her,

In a radiant half-halo, strung about in connective anguish,

She will not wake or know my disconsolate gaze,

And as the persistent Tintamar, I will raise my voice in the gale,

The isthmus gives birth to dismay, in a sickened array,

The sea is choked-up, with a will set to swallow the strand,

Sunder land from land, unbecomingly, though,

Subtle has she e’er been in my ears, a mask of civility,

Crooked, a collection of salt and weedy grottoes,

Availed, she veils her purposes well, and yet,

As faintly I tread on, past ruin, past her perfidious palls,

Laced-up to the gills, I am met with familiar impotence,

Insolence; fraught with impertinence, I clamber amidst the rocks,

The sky, in tandem, lets loose her fettered dolor,

And I, as ever I have been, am drenched through the bone,

With a certain unshakable pallour, the hour is stilled,

The footpath, solicitous -- upon which I make my way on.