Getting to the wilderness takes a bus. That small, almost comic detail opens Luca Flauto's poem and sets up the tension that runs through the rest: the speaker wants to be inside untouched nature, yet arrives as a visitor, on a timetable, in company. "We waited the bus, / waited to jump into / the wilderness of the Isle." The repeated "waited" stretches the opening into impatience, and "jump into" treats the landscape as if it were water, something to plunge into. That verb is a promise the poem keeps only in its final lines, and even there only as a dream.
Between those two points the poem is a journey, and its construction follows it. Seven short stanzas, four of three lines and then three of four, move from the road to the hills to the beach. The verse is free, with no rhyme and no regular metre. Lines often end on a hinge word ("jump into", "dive in", "looking for"), so the reader tips forward into the next line, much as the travellers sway on their "crooked road". Some phrasing also bends standard English: "waited the bus", "dive in the foamy sea", "I dreamt to feel". Whether or not this is deliberate, it gives the voice the feel of someone reaching for words, which suits a poem about the gap between wanting an experience and fully having it.
The imagery starts by making the land behave like the speaker wishes to. The cliffs "dive in / the foamy sea", and then, in a neat compression, comes "and so the shrubs". Even the plants are throwing themselves at the water. The third stanza splits the world in two, "left to the seaside, / right to the rocky hills", and the fourth fuses it again: "the elements combine / in a marvellous painting". The word "painting" matters. A painting is something you look at from a distance, and the speaker is already framing the island as a picture rather than a place to enter.
The twitchers in the fifth stanza are a brief, wry detour. They hunt "unknown discoveries", but the wind "cuts their noise / leaving just a thin muffed voice". "Muffed" is presumably "muffled", and its oddness suits the sound it describes. Human ambition to find and name things shrinks to a faint thread against the weather. The speaker, who also arrived by bus, is hardly exempt, though the poem lets the joke land lightly.
The sixth stanza is the pivot. The beach is "the whitest of all I've seen", a superlative of pure delight, but the next line turns: "An unpleasant thought, / the one about untouchable things." The poem never explains the thought, and that restraint is its boldest move. One reading is that purity can be spoiled by contact. Another is that the most beautiful things can be seen but never possessed. The abstract phrase stands out among the concrete nouns of cliff, shrub and sand, and "unpleasant" is a flat, understated word for what may be the poem's real subject.
The ending answers with a wish. "I dreamt to feel the clear water mirror / all over me" turns "mirror" into a verb, so the water reflects and touches at once, which dissolves the gap between looking and touching that the painting created. The last two lines slow down: "slowly feeling the ocean / shaping around my body". The soft repeated "-ing" endings stretch the moment, and the ocean becomes the active force while the speaker is the one being shaped. "Body" is the poem's final word and the first time the physical self appears. Until then the speaker has waited, swayed, breathed the "sparkling air" and looked. Now, at last, he wants to feel.
Because the verb is "dreamt", we never learn whether the swim happens, and the thought about untouchable things still hangs over it. The poem is quiet, but it captures something many people recognise: wanting to enter a beautiful place without damaging what made it beautiful. The "5" in the title suggests one piece of a numbered sequence, but this poem works on its own, ending on a longing rather than an answer.