Wherever you walk on this island
you strike stone, the erratics
and karsts of the storm beach
left here a hundred million years.
They have cleared what they could,
blocked them up into walls and built
a fortress over clints and grykes.
Seems all green grows thorny here
at edges and the edges’ edges.
That salt air tips the thistles
and the stones put down roots.
The whole world is a shrine,
I want to say, and marked
with stones—though it is not true.
Nor is it a grave. It may be
there is no whole world at all,
only an island in troubled seas,
or only what I know of it is hard
as stone, but soluble in water.