It

It is Drift, Drift nears Ness, Drift is a world-shaper
Drift makes itself up as it goes along
Drift loves lists, Drift is tide, gravity, storm, wave
Wind, gyre and coastal aspect, among other things

Drift acknowledges debts to the global capital flows
That determine prevailing trade currents
Drift looks drastically disorganised to the untrained eye
But is in fact a micro-manager of OC tidiness

Drift's favourite holiday destination
Is two tiny cove-beaches on the South Coast
One of which gathers right-hand gloves in its jetsam
And the other of which gathers left-hand gloves in its jetsam

Drift relishes equally the company of sea-coal
Lego Star Wars figures, barnacles and gull feathers
Drift is fully reconciled to the unattached life
Drift has been known to unite with long-lost partners

Drift speaks an unpretentious tongue
A mongrel patois pat of this-and-that bodged into anyoldcreole
When you're with Drift, time does strange things
Drift is one of those friends who lays out odd things side by side, fully disassembled

Today with Dirft is Precambrian
Today with Drift is Anthropocene

Drift doesn't do time, Drift does space
Drift is always becoming
Drift has unbounded potential
Drift is unimaginably vast

If you had to describe Drift, you'd need
A new language and a new kind of map
The only end to Drift would be the end of oceans
Which would be the end of the planet
And no one really wants that

When you're with Drift, space does strange things
Drift is a hermit crab taking a face-cream tub as shell on a Pacific atoll
Drift is 434 rusted steel fishing globe-floats
In a single bay on an island of the Lofoten Archipelago

Drift is the wood out of which humans were first carved
Drift dislikes being made to represent anything which devalues the glittering that all that Drift makes
Drift is matter plus motion, Drift is matter plus motion
Drift is matter plus motion and that is the end of it

(Listening to Drift is one of the most beautiful sounds in the world)
(As beautiful as listening to your child breathe in the darkness)

Drift is an avocet skull writhing with maggots
Drift is Colgate-Palmolive teeth-whitening toothpaste tube, no top
Drift is a seal corpse with zither-rig jaw and off-planet fur
Drift is kelp and bladderwrack, long-line hooks and net, jerrycan and a doll's head

Drift is a beached sperm whale, sheer-sided as a battleship
Downwind of which you won't stand, leaking red onto the rocks, watching the world grey out
Through one tiny
Upwards eye

Drift happens to you rather than
You to Drift
Right now, Drift is approaching Ness
From the sea by all directions

Drift is coming in piece by piece
Gathering on the beach
Quietly assembling either side
Of the Green Chapel
The laboratories will be Drift soon