You come ashore to sight of castings,
an engine house, the far-off silhouettes

of fieldwork and minehaul. The sound
of this island is assembly, manufacture

knolled into landscape. You breathe
in air and taste ore. If you expected

welcome, you were mistaken.
What you know of this place—hills

the beaten texture of worked metal,
a winter the white silver of tin

won from cassiterite—are the elements
of something approaching myth.

The trick by which an island disappears
is not through a trapdoor in a metaphor

of the cardboard theatre of the world,
is not the shift of tectonic plates:

the island becomes the tale of island;
its inhabitants, figures of inhabitants.