Nice Little Thing

there are places where the turning tide
will enter in roaring as if to say
to the onlookers in an unscripted aside:

here I come, the gallant hero of the play,
take note, on me you fix your faces-
let them be wet with tears, or wet with spray-

but this flat land is not one of those places;
here the waters rise with sullen stealth,
seep in across their previous traces

depositing their silts' grey wealth
on the long saurian wallowing lines
of the mud banks whose health

is belied by the black ooze where the tines
of the bait-diggers' forks have busily sought
lugworms, or ragworms with their vicious spines;

no, here the change in the world comes as it ought,
in an alteration of the light, a faint glimmer
out along the horizon, like a thought

slipping into the mind to shimmer
elusive at the edge of meaning,
or a passing cloud turning the sunlight dimmer

for a moment, or like dreaming
and turning again to the the world to find it changed
utterly changed, remade and gleaming,

darkly gleaming and wholly rearranged:
the eyots gone under muddy water and missing,
the lines of land and water all deranged

and the dry blond grass on the seawall hissing
a chorus at the east wind's mad direction,
and the stunted thorn trees bowing together and kissing.