There always arrive in the Owl Peninsula
waves that scramble for borders
unknown
to others.

Swarming, releasing
the bay’s palms, the row of rocks,
in the raucous crash
of the tide engraving a mark.

But this time the forest balm chooses the cumin colour
in the southern cove of the harbour.
Mid-May jubilee
when the fowls no longer flee.

While you will hear, too, the cry of the lighthouse
clashing against the mist, exposing the dark,
reaching out
for the weary boats,

the drooping sails
amidst hard drizzle, pattering drizzle,
where the skyline
ceases to blue, in the swollen late afternoon.

The next morning the bay will be dried up
and they will come home, all will come home,
the lobster hunters
to the shore that is no more.

And you ask whether tomorrow you will see again
the crescent moon, moving like a tightrope walker
in a twilight circus
between the rock peaks and the elm trees.

But in the Owl Peninsula, silence
is a solemn sound,
the murmur of hickory leaves: the helmsman’s voice
over the navigation map.

And you will go there, following his direction,
as if the waves, as if the waves
were blue, grey, always—
before they leave.