Visual Inspection. Matt Rader

island is russet-coloured and black. A couple dozen metres in diameter. Barren. Large white seabirds glide down from the milk-blue sky, perch on the rock, then flap away. I’m standing on a beach of fine round pebbles the ocean combs through as it recedes.

      Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash/ Come flowing through… / You stand there like a pipe / Being played by water… / And diminuendo runs through all its scales…²¹

      This is what I know: the island is still warm. As if it were new. As if in this place, deep inside myself, human time and geological time are unified.