Lost to View

A range of clouds banked up behind the peak

Of that apocryphal

Blue mountain, with a wide, oblique

Burst of late sun

Projecting at the east’s receding wall

A film of what the day so far has done:

A wind that tries to scrape

The breaking waves up as they run

Across the bay

And shatter at the foot of Fluted Cape

In tern and gannet-printed veils of spray;

And trees the wind has caught,

Which seem too self-contained to sway

When they are blown,

And only move as a pleasing afterthought.

No one. No human presence has been known,

Surely, to venture here.

It takes one blackbird to disown

That vagary

And, whistling just a few feet from his ear,

To call him back again and make him be

The subject in this scene,

The one who is required to see.

Another day,

No blackbird with its song will intervene.

The spray will hang its veils and the trees sway.