"I come here when I fear my soul/has fled forever," says the speaker in
Appearances
, about a place where land, water, and sky converge. In poems that take their shape from daily walks around a teeming harbor, Michael Collins meditates on nature, though not nature as "some place you visit/some museum to nostalgia through," but as a place of meeting and confrontation between nature and civilization, art and subject, consciousness and the unconscious, life and death. The poems in this sequence render images offered by both the human and natural worlds, even as the speaker knows that he "can't reason these worlds/back together."