Tove Jansson’s Island

 

They say her father sculpted in bronze

and her mother designed postage stamps—

great forms and fine detail her first food.

Little hands silently lifting a burin

or mallet, getting the heft of creation.

 

Sun and pollen, ruby ants in a row,

her ears filled with the breath of waves,

her schooling a blur of breathless pleasures

far from anything countable. (No boy

could match a bird’s fine wit.)

 

When she was grown, a boat

would take her to the island without

landing, and she would leap into the sea 

to guide the crate of a summer’s simple 

food to shore, as the boat circled away.

 

No clock or voice, no growl of motor

or purr of phone, she would delve

into the bounty of her young silence

to hear songs she let go easy into wind, 

but dozing became dreams, dreams stories

 

old and odd and shapely, bristling

with thoughts more like pine cones

or glittering seams in bedrock

than anything anyone had ever

known—stories of summer light,

 

of star seeds concentric around hints,

stones hefted like sorrows, leaves watched

unfurling hour by hour, lit feather

optimists lifting away across the sea

in the general drift of hidden happiness.

 

When autumn came, the boat

      brought exile.

Then she wintered by city ways—

streetcar clang, wires across the sky,

the naked glory of creation dressed

in small decisions, minor laws.

 

But summer, summer, summer … story,

story, story … until old, she finished: hut

empty, pages topped by a stone the sea

shaped with its scarf of centuries.