Sea Sonnet | Slow Words

Green, grey and yellow, the sea and the weather

Instatiate each other and the spectrum

Turns in it like a perishable creature.

The sea is old but the blue sea is sudden.

The wind japans the surface. Like a flower,

each point of contact biggens and is gone.

And when it rains the senses fold in four.

No sky, no sea – the whiteness is all one.

So I have made a little moon-like hole

With a thumbnail and through a blade of grass

I watch the weather make the sea my soul,

which is space performed on by a space;

and when it rains, the very integer

and shape of water disappears in water.

Alice Oswald, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, Oxford University Press, 1996; Faber and Faber 2007

Cover: Elmgreen&Dragset, Powerless Structure, artwork at Punta della Dogana, Venice (picture Diana Marrone)