The Reef of Natural Causes

Everyone, it seems, is struck
by that muscular torso—Newton’s;
one of Blake’s three bogeys
sitting in his two dimensional world.

Fewer note what he is sitting on:
the reef of natural causes,
a landscape made of tiny polyp
corpses, catacombs rimmed

with the most precarious fronds
of what the sea coughs up.
For the tides are always bringing
news of something strange.

An underwater forest of what exists
outside our sight, the silence
of Atlantis lost beneath the waves.
The colour of the sky is merest rumour.

Here, in the sea of time and space,
Newton’s body extends its pose,
and his thought leaches substance from
the reef of natural causes.

He sits on a lung or some spare
body part, waiting to be
born into the fourfold vision,
the bed from which Albion must rise.