246 Mythology poems

Guarda mi disse, le feroce Erine Let us come upon him first as if in a dream, anonymous triple presence, memory made substance and tally of heart’s rot: then in the waking Now be demonstrable, seem sole aspect of being’s essence, coffin to the living touch, self’s Iscariot. Then he will loath the year’s recurrent long caress without hope of divorce, envying idiocy’s apathy or the stress of definite remorse. He will lapse into a halflife lest the taut force of the mind’s eagerness recall those fiends or new apparitions endorse his excessive distress. He will shrink, his manhood leave him, slough selfaware the last skin of the flayed: despair. He will nurse his terror carefully, uncertain even of death’s solace, impotent to outpace dispersion of the soul, disruption of the brain.

All their songs are of one hour Before dawn, when the birds begin. I sing another. In helpless midday, at the hour Even sparrows have no heart to shrill Comes news . . . Suddenly, the unimaginable Needs imagination and finds none. Violet ocean only nothing. Smoke of thyme and of cedar, Ornate birds, nothing. Even a god who came here, Hearing a sweet voice, Would find only old fires now, Brittle in the blackened trees. She was mast and sail. She was A stillness pregnant with motion, Adorable to me as, all my life, I have hidden a cruel, secret ocean In sinews and in sleep and cowardice. She forgave me. Once, she wept for me. Our child died then, and she is with him.

There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier Than all the valleys of Ionian hills. The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen, Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine, And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars The long brook falling thro' the clov'n ravine In cataract after cataract to the sea. Behind the valley topmost Gargarus Stands up and takes the morning: but in front The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal Troas and Ilion's column'd citadel, The crown of Troas. Hither came at noon Mournful Oenone, wandering forlorn Of Paris, once her playmate on the hills. Her cheek had lost the rose, and round her neck Floated her hair or seem'd to float in rest. She, leaning on a fragment twined with vine, Sang to the stillness, till the mountain-shade Sloped downward to her seat from the upper cliff. "O mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida, Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. For now the noonday quiet holds the hill: The grasshopper is silent in the grass: The lizard, with his shadow on the stone, Rests like a shadow, and the winds are dead. The purple flower droops: the golden bee Is lily-cradled: I alone awake. My eyes are full of tears, my heart of love, My heart is breaking, and my eyes are dim, And I am all aweary of my life. "O mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida, Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. Hear me, O Earth, hear me, O Hills, O Caves That house the cold crown'd snake! O mountain brooks, I am the daughter of a River-God, Hear me, for I will speak, and build up all My sorrow with my song, as yonder walls Rose slowly to a music slowly breathed, A cloud that gather'd shape: for it may be That, while I speak of it, a little while My heart may wander from its deeper woe. "O mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida, Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. I waited underneath the dawning hills, Aloft the mountain lawn was dewy-dark, And dewy-dark aloft the mountain pine: Beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris, Leading a jet-black goat white-horn'd, white-hooved, Came up from reedy Simois all alone. "O mother Ida, harken ere I die. Far-off the torrent call'd me from the cleft: Far up the solitary morning smote The streaks of virgin snow. With down-dropt eyes I sat alone: white-breasted like a star Fronting the dawn he moved; a leopard skin Droop'd from his shoulder, but his sunny hair Cluster'd about his temples like a God's: And his cheek brighten'd as the foam-bow brightens When the wind blows the foam, and all my heart Went forth to embrace him coming ere he came. "Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. He smiled, and opening out his milk-white palm Disclosed a fruit of pure Hesperian gold, That smelt ambrosially, and while I look'd And listen'd, the full-flowing river of speech Came down upon my heart. My own Oenone, Beautiful-brow'd Oenone, my own soul, Behold this fruit, whose gleaming rind ingrav'n "For the most fair," would seem to award it thine, As lovelier than whatever Oread haunt The knolls of Ida, loveliest in all grace Of movement, and the charm of married brows.' "Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. He prest the blossom of his lips to mine, And added 'This was cast upon the board, When all the full-faced presence of the Gods Ranged in the halls of Peleus; whereupon Rose feud, with question unto whom 'twere due: But light-foot Iris brought it yester-eve, Delivering that to me, by common voice Elected umpire, Herè comes to-day, Pallas and Aphroditè, claiming each This meed of fairest. Thou, within the cave Behind yon whispering tuft of oldest pine, Mayst well behold them unbeheld, unheard Hear all, and see thy Paris judge of Gods.' "Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. It was the deep midnoon: one silvery cloud Had lost his way between the piney sides Of this long glen. Then to the bower they came, Naked they came to that smooth-swarded bower, And at their feet the crocus brake like fire, Violet, amaracus, and asphodel, Lotos and lilies: and a wind arose, And overhead the wandering ivy and vine, This way and that, in many a wild festoon Ran riot, garlanding the gnarled boughs With bunch and berry and flower thro' and thro'. "O mother Ida, harken ere I die. On the tree-tops a crested peacock lit, And o'er him flow'd a golden cloud, and lean'd Upon him, slowly dropping fragrant dew. Then first I heard the voice of her, to whom Coming thro' Heaven, like a light that grows Larger and clearer, with one mind the Gods Rise up for reverence. She to Paris made Proffer of royal power, ample rule Unquestion'd, overflowing revenue Wherewith to embellish state, 'from many a vale And river-sunder'd champaign clothed with corn, Or labour'd mine undrainable of ore. Honour,' she said, 'and homage, tax and toll, From many an inland town and haven large, Mast-throng'd beneath her shadowing citadel In glassy bays among her tallest towers.' "O mother Ida, harken ere I die. Still she spake on and still she spake of power, 'Which in all action is the end of all; Power fitted to the season; wisdom-bred And throned of wisdom—from all neighbour crowns Alliance and allegiance, till thy hand Fail from the sceptre-staff. Such boon from me, From me, Heaven's Queen, Paris, to thee king-born, A shepherd all thy life but yet king-born, Should come most welcome, seeing men, in power Only, are likest Gods, who have attain'd Rest in a happy place and quiet seats Above the thunder, with undying bliss In knowledge of their own supremacy.' "Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. She ceased, and Paris held the costly fruit Out at arm's-length, so much the thought of power Flatter'd his spirit; but Pallas where she stood Somewhat apart, her clear and bared limbs O'erthwarted with the brazen-headed spear Upon her pearly shoulder leaning cold, The while, above, her full and earnest eye Over her snow-cold breast and angry cheek Kept watch, waiting decision, made reply. "Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, These three alone lead life to sovereign power. Yet not for power (power of herself Would come uncall'd for) but to live by law, Acting the law we live by without fear; And, because right is right, to follow right Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.' "Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. Again she said: 'I woo thee not with gifts. Sequel of guerdon could not alter me To fairer. Judge thou me by what I am, So shalt thou find me fairest. Yet, indeed, If gazing on divinity disrobed Thy mortal eyes are frail to judge of fair, Unbias'd by self-profit, oh! rest thee sure That I shall love thee well and cleave to thee, So that my vigour, wedded to thy blood, Shall strike within thy pulses, like a God's, To push thee forward thro' a life of shocks, Dangers, and deeds, until endurance grow Sinew'd with action, and the full-grown will, Circled thro' all experiences, pure law, Commeasure perfect freedom.' Here she ceas'd And Paris ponder'd, and I cried, 'O Paris, Give it to Pallas!' but he heard me not, Or hearing would not hear me, woe is me! "O mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida, Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. Idalian Aphroditè beautiful, Fresh as the foam, new-bathed in Paphian wells, With rosy slender fingers backward drew From her warm brows and bosom her deep hair Ambrosial, golden round her lucid throat And shoulder: from the violets her light foot Shone rosy-white, and o'er her rounded form Between the shadows of the vine-bunches Floated the glowing sunlights, as she moved. "Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. She with a subtle smile in her mild eyes, The herald of her triumph, drawing nigh Half-whisper'd in his ear, 'I promise thee The fairest and most loving wife in Greece.' She spoke and laugh'd: I shut my sight for fear: But when I look'd, Paris had raised his arm, And I beheld great Herè's angry eyes, As she withdrew into the golden cloud, And I was left alone within the bower; And from that time to this I am alone, And I shall be alone until I die. "Yet, mother Ida, harken ere I die. Fairest—why fairest wife? am I not fair? My love hath told me so a thousand times. Methinks I must be fair, for yesterday, When I past by, a wild and wanton pard, Eyed like the evening star, with playful tail Crouch'd fawning in the weed. Most loving is she? Ah me, my mountain shepherd, that my arms Were wound about thee, and my hot lips prest Close, close to thine in that quick-falling dew Of fruitful kisses, thick as Autumn rains Flash in the pools of whirling Simois! "O mother, hear me yet before I die. They came, they cut away my tallest pines, My tall dark pines, that plumed the craggy ledge High over the blue gorge, and all between The snowy peak and snow-white cataract Foster'd the callow eaglet—from beneath Whose thick mysterious boughs in the dark morn The panther's roar came muffled, while I sat Low in the valley. Never, never more Shall lone OEnone see the morning mist Sweep thro' them; never see them overlaid With narrow moon-lit slips of silver cloud, Between the loud stream and the trembling stars. "O mother, hear me yet before I die. I wish that somewhere in the ruin'd folds, Among the fragments tumbled from the glens, Or the dry thickets, I could meet with her The Abominable, that uninvited came Into the fair Pele{:i}an banquet-hall, And cast the golden fruit upon the board, And bred this change; that I might speak my mind, And tell her to her face how much I hate Her presence, hated both of Gods and men. "O mother, hear me yet before I die. Hath he not sworn his love a thousand times, In this green valley, under this green hill, Ev'n on this hand, and sitting on this stone? Seal'd it with kisses? water'd it with tears? O happy tears, and how unlike to these! O happy Heaven, how canst thou see my face? O happy earth, how canst thou bear my weight? O death, death, death, thou ever-floating cloud, There are enough unhappy on this earth, Pass by the happy souls, that love to live: I pray thee, pass before my light of life, And shadow all my soul, that I may die. Thou weighest heavy on the heart within, Weigh heavy on my eyelids: let me die. "O mother, hear me yet before I die. I will not die alone, for fiery thoughts Do shape themselves within me, more and more, Whereof I catch the issue, as I hear Dead sounds at night come from the inmost hills, Like footsteps upon wool. I dimly see My far-off doubtful purpose, as a mother Conjectures of the features of her child Ere it is born: her child!—a shudder comes Across me: never child be born of me, Unblest, to vex me with his father's eyes! "O mother, hear me yet before I die. Hear me, O earth. I will not die alone, Lest their shrill happy laughter come to me Walking the cold and starless road of death Uncomforted, leaving my ancient love With the Greek woman. I will rise and go Down into Troy, and ere the stars come forth Talk with the wild Cassandra, for she says A fire dances before her, and a sound Rings ever in her ears of armed men. What this may be I know not, but I know That, wheresoe'er I am by night and day, All earth and air seem only burning fire."

BOOK SIX Chapter XLIV I In hill-towns, from San Fernando to Mayagüez, the same sunrise stirred the feathered lances of cane down the archipelago’s highways. The first breeze rattled the spears and their noise was like distant rain marching down from the hills, like a shell at your ears. In the cool asphalt Sundays of the Antilles the light brought the bitter history of sugar across the squared fields, heightening towards harvest, to the bleached flags of the Indian diaspora. The drizzling light blew across the savannah darkening the racehorses’ hides; mist slowly erased the royal palms on the crests of the hills and the hills themselves. The brown patches the horses had grazed shone as wet as their hides. A skittish stallion jerked at his bridle, marble-eyed at the thunder muffling the hills, but the groom was drawing him in like a fisherman, wrapping the slack line under one fist, then with the other tightening the rein and narrowing the circle. The sky cracked asunder and a forked tree flashed, and suddenly that black rain which can lose an entire archipelago in broad daylight was pouring tin nails on the roof, hammering the balcony. I closed the French window, and thought of the horses in their stalls with one hoof tilted, watching the ropes of rain. I lay in bed with current gone from the bed-lamp and heard the roar of wind shaking the windows, and I remembered Achille on his own mattress and desperate Hector trying to save his canoe, I thought of Helen as my island lost in the haze, and I was sure I’d never see her again. All of a sudden the rain stopped and I heard the sluicing of water down the guttering. I opened the window when the sun came out. It replaced the tiny brooms of palms on the ridges. On the red galvanized roof of the paddock, the wet sparkled, then the grooms led the horses over the new grass and exercised them again, and there was a different brightness in everything, in the leaves, in the horses’ eyes. II I smelt the leaves threshing at the top of the year in green January over the orange villas and military barracks where the Plunketts were, the harbour flecked by the wind that comes with Christmas, edged with the Arctic, that was christened Vent Noël; it stayed until March and, with luck, until Easter. It freshened the cedars, waxed the laurier-cannelle, and hid the African swift. I smelt the drizzle on the asphalt leaving the Morne, it was the smell of an iron on damp cloth; I heard the sizzle of fried jackfish in oil with their coppery skin; I smelt ham studded with cloves, the crusted accra, the wax in the varnished parlour: Come in. Come in, the arm of the Morris chair sticky with lacquer; I saw a sail going out and a sail coming in, and a breeze so fresh it lifted the lace curtains like a petticoat, like a sail towards Ithaca; I smelt a dead rivulet in the clogged drains. III Ah, twin-headed January, seeing either tense: a past, they assured us, born in degradation, and a present that lifted us up with the wind’s noise in the breadfruit leaves with such an elation that it contradicts what is past! The cannonballs of rotting breadfruit from the Battle of the Saints, the asterisks of bulletholes in the brick walls of the redoubt. I lived there with every sense. I smelt with my eyes, I could see with my nostrils. Chapter XLV I One side of the coast plunges its precipices into the Atlantic. Turns require wide locks, since the shoulder is sharp and the curve just misses a long drop over the wind-bent trees and the rocks between the trees. There is a wide view of Dennery, with its stone church and raw ochre cliffs at whose base the African breakers end. Across the flecked sea whose combers veil and unveil the rocks with their lace the next port is Dakar. The uninterrupted wind thuds under the wings of frigates, you see them bent from a force that has crossed the world, tilting to find purchase in the sudden downdrafts of its current. The breeze threshed the palms on the cool December road where the Comet hurtled with empty leopard seats, so fast a man on a donkey trying to read its oncoming fiery sign heard only two thudding beats from the up-tempo zouk that its stereo played when it screeched round a bridge and began to ascend away from the palm-fronds and their wickerwork shade that left the windscreen clear as it locked round the bend, where Hector suddenly saw the trotting piglet and thought of Plunkett’s warning as he heard it screel with the same sound that the tires of the Comet made rounding the curve from the sweat-greased steering wheel. The rear wheels spin to a dead stop, like a helm. The piglet trots down the safer side of the road. Lodged in their broken branches the curled letters flame. Hector had both hands on the wheel. His head was bowed under the swaying statue of the Madonna of the Rocks, her smile swayed under the blue hood, and when her fluted robe stilled, the smile stayed on her dimpled porcelain. She saw, in the bowed man, the calm common oval of prayer, the head’s usual angle over the pew of the dashboard. Her lifted palm, small as a doll’s from its cerulean mantle, indicated that he had prayed enough to the lace of foam round the cliff’s altar, that now, if he wished, he could lift his head, but he stayed in the same place, the way a man will remain when Mass is finished, not unclenching his hands or freeing one to cross forehead, heart, and shoulders swiftly and then kneel facing the altar. He bowed in endless remorse, for her mercy at what he had done to Achille, his brother. But his arc was over, for the course of every comet is such. The fated crescent was printed on the road by the scorching tires. A salt tear ran down the porcelain cheek and it went in one slow drop to the clenched knuckle that still gripped the wheel. On the flecked sea, the uninterrupted wind herded the long African combers, and whipped the small flag of the island on its silver spearhead. II Drivers leant over the rail. One seized my luggage off the porter’s cart. The rest burst into patois, with gestures of despair at the lost privilege of driving me, then turned to other customers. In the evening pastures horses grazed, their hides wet with light that shot its lances over the combers. I had the transport all to myself. “You all set? Good. A good pal of mine died in that chariot of his called the Comet.” He turned in the front seat, spinning the air with his free hand. I sat, sprawled out in the back, discouraging talk, with my crossed feet. “You never know when, eh? I was at the airport that day. I see him take off like a rocket. I always said that thing have too much horsepower. And so said, so done. The same hotel, chief, correct?” I saw the coastal villages receding as the highway’s tongue translated bush into forest, the wild savannah into moderate pastures, that other life going in its “change for the best,” its peace paralyzed in a postcard, a concrete future ahead of it all, in the cinder-blocks of hotel development with the obsolete craft of the carpenter, as I sensed, in the neat marinas, the fisherman’s phantom. Old oarlocks and rusting fretsaw. My craft required the same crouching care, the same crabbed, natural devotion of the hand that stencilled a flowered window-frame or planed an elegant canoe; its time was gone with the spirit in the wood, as wood grew obsolete and plasterers smoothed the blank page of white concrete. I watched the afternoon sea. Didn’t I want the poor to stay in the same light so that I could transfix them in amber, the afterglow of an empire, preferring a shed of palm-thatch with tilted sticks to that blue bus-stop? Didn’t I prefer a road from which tracks climbed into the thickening syntax of colonial travellers, the measured prose I read as a schoolboy? That cove, with its brown shallows there, Praslin? That heron? Had they waited for me to develop my craft? Why hallow that pretence of preserving what they left, the hypocrisy of loving them from hotels, a biscuit-tin fence smothered in love-vines, scenes to which I was attached as blindly as Plunkett with his remorseful research? Art is History’s nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village. The gap between the driver and me increased when he said: “The place changing, eh?” where an old rumshop had gone, but not that river with its clogged shadows.That would make me a stranger. “All to the good,” he said. I said, “All to the good,” then, “whoever they are,” to myself. I caught his eyes in the mirror. We were climbing out of Micoud. Hadn’t I made their poverty my paradise? His back could have been Hector’s, ferrying tourists in the other direction home, the leopard seat scratching their damp backs like the fur-covered armrests. He had driven his burnt-out cargo, tired of sweat, who longed for snow on the moon and didn’t have to face the heat of that sinking sun, who knew a climate as monotonous as this one could only produce from its unvarying vegetation flashes of a primal insight like those red-pronged lilies that shot from the verge, that their dried calabashes of fake African masks for a fake Achilles rattled with the seeds that came from other men’s minds. So let them think that. Who needed art in this place where even the old women strode with stiff-backed spines, and the fishermen had such adept thumbs, such grace these people had, but what they envied most in them was the calypso part, the Caribbean lilt still in the shells of their ears, like the surf’s rhythm, until too much happiness was shadowed with guilt like any Eden, and they sighed at the sign: HEWANNORRA (Iounalao), the gold sea flat as a credit-card, extending its line to a beach that now looked just like everywhere else, Greece or Hawaii. Now the goddamn souvenir felt absurd, excessive. The painted gourds, the shells. Their own faces as brown as gourds. Mine felt as strange as those at the counter feeling their bodies change. III Change lay in our silence. We had come to that bend where the trees are warped by wind, and the cliffs, raw, shelve surely to foam. “Is right here everything end,” the driver said, and rammed open the transport door on his side, then mine. “Anyway, chief, the view nice.” I joined him at the gusting edge. “His name was Hector.” The name was bent like the trees on the precipice to point inland. In its echo a man-o’-war screamed on the wind. The driver moved off for a piss, then shouted over his shoulder: “A road-warrior. He would drive like a madman when the power took. He had a nice woman. Maybe he died for her.” For her and tourism, I thought. The driver shook himself, zipping then hoisting his crotch. “Crazy, but a gentle fellow anyway, with a very good brain.” Cut to a leopard galloping on a dry plain across Serengeti. Cut to the spraying fans drummed by a riderless stallion, its wild mane scaring the Scamander. Cut to a woman’s hands clenched towards her mouth with no sound. Cut to the wheel of a chariot’s spiked hubcap. Cut to the face of his muscling jaw, then flashback to Achille hurling a red tin and a cutlass. Next, a vase with a girl’s hoarse whisper echoing “Omeros,” as in a conch-shell. Cut to a shield of silver rolling like a hubcap. Rewind, in slow motion, myrmidons gathering by a village river with lances for oars. Cut to the surpliced ocean droning its missal. Cut. A crane hoisting a wreck. A horse nosing the surf, then shuddering its neck. He’d paid the penalty of giving up the sea as graceless and as treacherous as it had seemed, for the taxi-business; he was making money, but all of that money was making him ashamed of the long afternoons of shouting by the wharf hustling passengers. He missed the uncertain sand under his feet, he sighed for the trough of a wave, and the jerk of the oar when it turned in his hand, and the rose conch sunset with its low pelicans. Castries was corrupting him with its roaring life, its littered market, with too many transport vans competing. Castries had been his common-law wife who, like Helen, he had longed for from a distance, and now he had both, but a frightening discontent hollowed his face; to find that the sea was a love he could never lose made every gesture violent: ramming the side-door shut, raking the clutch. He drove as if driven by furies, but furies paid the rent. A man who cursed the sea had cursed his own mother. Mer was both mother and sea. In his lost canoe he had said his prayers. But now he was in another kind of life that was changing him with his brand-new stereo, its endless garages, where he could not whip off his shirt, hearing the conch’s summoning note. Chapter XLVI I Hector was buried near the sea he had loved once. Not too far from the shallows where he fought Achille for a tin and Helen. He did not hear the sea-almond’s moan over the bay when Philoctete blew the shell, nor the one drumbeat of a wave-thud, nor a sail rattling to rest as its day’s work was over, and its mate, gauging depth, bent over the gunwale, then wearily sounding the fathoms with an oar, the same rite his shipmates would repeat soon enough when it was their turn to lie quiet as Hector, lowering a pitch-pine canoe in the earth’s trough, to sleep under the piled conchs, through every weather on the violet-wreathed mound. Crouching for his friend to hear, Achille whispered about their ancestral river, and those things he would recognize when he got there, his true home, forever and ever and ever, forever,compère. Then Philoctete limped over and rested his hand firmly on a shaking shoulder to anchor his sorrow. Seven Seas and Helen did not come nearer. Achille had carried an oar to the church and propped it outside with the red tin. Now his voice strengthened. He said: “Mate, this is your spear,” and laid the oar slowly, the same way he had placed the parallel oars in the hull of the gommier the day the African swift and its shadow raced. And this was the prayer that Achille could not utter: “The spear that I give you, my friend, is only wood. Vexation is past. I know how well you treat her. You never know my admiration, when you stood crossing the sun at the bow of the long canoe with the plates of your chest like a shield; I would say any enemy so was a compliment. ’Cause no African ever hurled his wide seine at the bay by which he was born with such beauty. You hear me? Men did not know you like me. All right. Sleep good. Good night.” Achille moved Philoctete’s hand, then he saw Helen standing alone and veiled in the widowing light. Then he reached down to the grave and lifted the tin to her. Helen nodded. A wind blew out the sun. II Pride set in Helen’s face after this, like a stone bracketed with Hector’s name; her lips were incised by its dates in parenthesis. She seemed more stern, more ennobled by distance as she slowly crossed the hot street of the village like a distant sail on the horizon. Grief heightened her. When she smiled it was with such distance that it was hard to tell if she had heard your condolence. It was the child, Ma Kilman told them, that made her more beautiful. III The rites of the island were simplified by its elements, which changed places. The grooved sea was Achille’s garden, the ridged plot of rattling plantains carried their sense of the sea, and Philoctete, on his height, often heard, in a wind that suddenly churned the rage of deep gorges, the leafy sound of far breakers plunging with smoke, and for smoke there were the bonfires which the sun catches on the blue heights at sunrise, doing the same work as Philoctete clearing his plot, just as, at sunset, smoke came from the glowing rim of the horizon as if from his enamel pot. The woodsmoke smelt of a regret that men cannot name. On the charred field, the massive sawn trunks burnt slowly like towers, and the great indigo dusk slowly plumed down, devouring the still leaves, igniting the firefly huts, lifting the panicky egret to beat its lagoon and shelve in the cage of the mangroves, take in the spars of its sails, then with quick-pricking head anchor itself shiftingly, and lift its question again. At night, the island reversed its elements, the heron of a quarter-moon floated from Hector’s grave, rain rose upwards from the sea, and the corrugated iron of the sea glittered with nailheads. Ragged plantains bent and stepped with their rustling powers over the furrows of Philoctete’s garden, a chorus of aged ancestors and straw, and, rustling, surrounded every house in the village with its back garden, with its rank midden of rusted chamber pots, rotting nets, and the moon’s cold basin. They sounded, when they shook, after the moonlit meridian of their crossing, like the night-surf; they gazed in silence at the shadows of their lamplit children. At Philoctete, groaning and soaking the flower on his shin with hot sulphur, cleaning its edges with yellow Vaseline, and, gripping his knee, squeezing rags from the basin. At night, when yards are asleep, and the broken line of the surf hisses like Philo,“Bon Dieu, aie, waie, my sin is this sore?” the old plantains suffer and shine. Chapter XLVII I Islands of bay leaves in the medicinal bath of a cauldron, a sibylline cure. The citron sprig of a lime-tree dividing the sky in half dipped its divining rod. The white spray of the thorn, which the swift bends lightly, waited for a black hand to break it in bits and boil its leaves for the wound from the pronged anchor rusting in clean bottom-sand. Ma Kilman, in a black hat with its berried fringe, eased herself sideways down the broken concrete step of the rumshop’s back door, closed it, and rammed the hinge tight. The bolt caught a finger and with that her instep arch twisted and she let out a soft Catholic curse, then crossed herself. She closed the gate. The asphalt sweated with the heat, the limp breadfruit leaves were thick over the fence. Her spectacles swam in their sweat. She plucked an armpit. The damn wig was badly made. She was going to five o’clock Mass, to la Messe, and sometimes she had to straighten it as she prayed until the wafer dissolved her with tenderness, the way a raindrop melts on the tongue of a breeze. In the church’s cool cave the sweat dried from her eyes. She rolled down the elastic bands below the knees of her swollen stockings. It was then that their vise round her calves reminded her of Philoctete. Then, numbering her beads, she began her own litany of berries, Hail Mary marigolds that stiffen their aureoles in the heights, mild anemone and clear watercress, the sacred heart of Jesus pierced like the anthurium, the thorns of logwood, called the tree of life, the aloe good for seizures, the hole in the daisy’s palm, with its drying blood that was the hole in the fisherman’s shin since he was pierced by a hook; there was the pale, roadside tisane of her malarial childhood. There was this one for easing a birth-breach, that one for a love-bath, before the buds of green sugar-apples in the sun ripened like her nipples in girlhood. But what path led through nettles to the cure, the furious sibyl couldn’t remember. Mimosa winced from her fingers, shutting like jalousies at some passing evil when she reached for them. The smell of incense lingers in her clothes. Inside, the candle-flames are erect round the bier of the altar while she and her friends old-talk on the steps, but the plant keeps its secret when her memory reaches, shuttering in its fronds. II The dew had not yet dried on the white-ribbed awnings and the nodding palanquins of umbrella yams where the dark grove had not heat but early mornings of perpetual freshness, in which the bearded arms of a cedar held council. Between its gnarled toes grew the reek of an unknown weed; its pronged flower sprang like a buried anchor; its windborne odours diverted the bee from its pollen, but its power, rooted in bitterness, drew her bowed head by the nose as a spike does a circling bull. To approach it Ma Kilman lowered her head to one side and screened the stench with a cologned handkerchief. The mulch it was rooted in carried the smell, when it gangrened, of Philoctete’s cut. In her black dress, her berried black hat, she climbed a goat-path up from the village, past the stones with dried palms and conchs, where the buried suffer the sun all day Sunday, while goats forage the new wreaths. Once more she pulled at the itch in her armpits, nearly dropping her purse. Then she climbed hard up the rain-cracked path, the bay closing behind her like a wound, and rested. Everything that echoed repeated its outline: a goat’s doddering bleat, a hammer multiplying a roof, and, through the back yards, a mother cursing a boy too nimble to beat. Ma Kilman picked up her purse and sighed on upwards to the thread of the smell, one arm behind her back, passing the cactus, the thorn trees, and then the wood appeared over her, thick green, the green almost black as her dress in its shade, its border of flowers flecking the pasture with spray. Then she staggered back from the line of ants at her feet. She saw the course they had kept behind her, following her from church, signalling a language she could not recognize. III A swift had carried the strong seed in its stomach centuries ago from its antipodal shore, skimming the sea-troughs, outdarting ospreys, her luck held to its shadow. She aimed to carry the cure that precedes every wound; the reversible Bight of Benin was her bow, her target the ringed haze of a circling horizon. The star-grains at night made her hungrier; the leafless sea with no house for her weariness. Sometimes she dozed in her flight for a swift’s second, closing the seeds of her stare, then ruddering straight. The dry sea-flakes whitened her breast, her feathers thinned. Then, one dawn the day-star rose slowly from the wrong place and it frightened her because all the breakers were blowing from the wrong east. She saw the horned island and uncurled her claws with one frail cry, since swifts are not given to song, and fluttered down to a beach, ejecting the seed in grass near the sand. She nestled in dry seaweed. In a year she was bleached bone. All of that motion a pile of fragile ash from the fire of her will, but the vine grew its own wings, out of the ocean it climbed like the ants, the ancestors of Achille, the women carrying coals after the dark door slid over the hold. As the weed grew in odour so did its strength at the damp root of the cedar, where the flower was anchored at the mottled root as a lizard crawled upwards, foot by sallow foot.

"Not by the justice that my father spurn'd, Not for the thousands whom my father slew, Altars unfed and temples overturn'd, Cold hearts and thankless tongues, where thanks are due; Fell this dread voice from lips that cannot lie, Stern sentence of the Powers of Destiny. "I will unfold my sentence and my crime. My crime—that, rapt in reverential awe, I sate obedient, in the fiery prime Of youth, self-govern'd, at the feet of Law; Ennobling this dull pomp, the life of kings, By contemplation of diviner things. "My father loved injustice, and lived long; Crown'd with grey hairs he died, and full of sway. I loved the good he scorn'd, and hated wrong— The Gods declare my recompense to-day. I look'd for life more lasting, rule more high; And when six years are measured, lo, I die! "Yet surely, O my people, did I deem Man's justice from the all-just Gods was given; A light that from some upper fount did beam, Some better archetype, whose seat was heaven; A light that, shining from the blest abodes, Did shadow somewhat of the life of Gods. "Mere phantoms of man's self-tormenting heart, Which on the sweets that woo it dares not feed! Vain dreams, which quench our pleasures, then depart When the duped soul, self-master'd, claims its meed; When, on the strenuous just man, Heaven bestows, Crown of his struggling life, an unjust close! "Seems it so light a thing, then, austere Powers, To spurn man's common lure, life's pleasant things? Seems there no joy in dances crown'd with flowers, Love, free to range, and regal banquetings? Bend ye on these, indeed, an unmoved eye, Not Gods but ghosts, in frozen apathy? "Or is it that some Force, too wise, too strong, Even for yourselves to conquer or beguile, Sweeps earth, and heaven, and men, and Gods along, Like the broad volume of the insurgent Nile? And the great powers we serve, themselves may be Slaves of a tyrannous necessity? "Or in mid-heaven, perhaps, your golden cars, Where earthly voice climbs never, wing their flight, And in wild hunt, through mazy tracts of stars, Sweep in the sounding stillness of the night? Or in deaf ease, on thrones of dazzling sheen, Drinking deep draughts of joy, ye dwell serene? "Oh, wherefore cheat our youth, if thus it be, Of one short joy, one lust, one pleasant dream? Stringing vain words of powers we cannot see, Blind divinations of a will supreme; Lost labour! when the circumambient gloom But hides, if Gods, Gods careless of our doom? "The rest I give to joy. Even while I speak, My sand runs short; and—as yon star-shot ray, Hemm'd by two banks of cloud, peers pale and weak, Now, as the barrier closes, dies away— Even so do past and future intertwine, Blotting this six years' space, which yet is mine. "Six years—six little years—six drops of time! Yet suns shall rise, and many moons shall wane, And old men die, and young men pass their prime, And languid pleasure fade and flower again, And the dull Gods behold, ere these are flown, Revels more deep, joy keener than their own. "Into the silence of the groves and woods I will go forth; though something would I say— Something—yet what, I know not; for the Gods The doom they pass revoke not, nor delay; And prayers, and gifts, and tears, are fruitless all, And the night waxes, and the shadows fall. "Ye men of Egypt, ye have heard your king! I go, and I return not. But the will Of the great Gods is plain; and ye must bring Ill deeds, ill passions, zealous to fulfil Their pleasure, to their feet; and reap their praise, The praise of Gods, rich boon! and length of days." —So spake he, half in anger, half in scorn; And one loud cry of grief and of amaze Broke from his sorrowing people; so he spake, And turning, left them there; and with brief pause, Girt with a throng of revellers, bent his way To the cool region of the groves he loved. There by the river-banks he wander'd on, From palm-grove on to palm-grove, happy trees, Their smooth tops shining sunward, and beneath Burying their unsunn'd stems in grass and flowers; Where in one dream the feverish time of youth Might fade in slumber, and the feet of joy Might wander all day long and never tire. Here came the king, holding high feast, at morn, Rose-crown'd; and ever, when the sun went down, A hundred lamps beam'd in the tranquil gloom, From tree to tree all through the twinkling grove, Revealing all the tumult of the feast— Flush'd guests, and golden goblets foam'd with wine; While the deep-burnish'd foliage overhead Splinter'd the silver arrows of the moon. It may be that sometimes his wondering soul From the loud joyful laughter of his lips Might shrink half startled, like a guilty man Who wrestles with his dream; as some pale shape Gliding half hidden through the dusky stems, Would thrust a hand before the lifted bowl, Whispering: A little space, and thou art mine! It may be on that joyless feast his eye Dwelt with mere outward seeming; he, within, Took measure of his soul, and knew its strength, And by that silent knowledge, day by day, Was calm'd, ennobled, comforted, sustain'd. It may be; but not less his brow was smooth, And his clear laugh fled ringing through the gloom, And his mirth quail'd not at the mild reproof Sigh'd out by winter's sad tranquillity; Nor, pall'd with its own fulness, ebb'd and died In the rich languor of long summer-days; Nor wither'd when the palm-tree plumes, that roof'd With their mild dark his grassy banquet-hall, Bent to the cold winds of the showerless spring; No, nor grew dark when autumn brought the clouds. So six long years he revell'd, night and day. And when the mirth wax'd loudest, with dull sound Sometimes from the grove's centre echoes came, To tell his wondering people of their king; In the still night, across the steaming flats, Mix'd with the murmur of the moving Nile.

O fluent one, o muscle full of hydrogen, o stuff of grief, whom the Greeks accuse of spoiling souls, whose destiny is downward, whose reflecting's up—I think I must have come from you. Just one more cup.

I was asleep while you were dying. It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow I make between my slumber and my waking, the Erebus I keep you in, still trying not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow, but in dreams you live. So I try taking you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning, my eyes open, I find you do not follow. Again and again, this constant forsaking. * Again and again, this constant forsaking: my eyes open, I find you do not follow. You back into morning, sleep-heavy, turning. But in dreams you live. So I try taking, not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow. The Erebus I keep you in—still, trying— I make between my slumber and my waking. It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow. I was asleep while you were dying.

night – sky         bird’s         world to know         to know         in my life to know what I have said to myself the dark to escape in brilliant highways of the night sky, finally why had they not killed me why did they fire that warning wounding cannon only the one round I hold a superstition because of this    lost to be lost    Wyatt’s lyric and Rezi’s running thru my mind in the destroyed (and guilty) Theatre of the War    I’d cried and remembered boyhood    degradation         other degradations and this crime I will not recover from that landscape it will be in my mind it will fill my mind and this is horrible death bed         pavement         the secret taste of being lost dead clown in the birds’ world what names (but my name) and my love’s name to speak into the eyes of the Tyger         blaze of changes . . . ‘named the animals’         name and name the vigorous dusty strong animals gather under the joists   the boards   older than they   giving them darkness the gifted dark tho names   the names   the ‘little’ adventurous words   a mountain   the cliff a wave are taxonomy I believe in the world because it is impossible         the shack on the coast under the eaves the rain barrel flooding in the weather and no lights across rough water illumined as tho the narrow end of the funnel what are the names of the Tyger   to speak to the eyes of the Tiger   blaze of the tiger   who moves in the forest leaving no scent but the pine needles’ his eyes blink quick in         the shack in the knife-cut and the opaque white bread each side of the knife

1 The angel — three years we waited for him, attention riveted, closely scanning the pines the shore the stars. One with the blade of the plough or the ship’s keel we were searching to find once more the first seed so that the age-old drama could begin again. We returned to our homes broken, limbs incapable, mouths cracked by the tastes of rust and brine. when we woke we traveled towards the north, strangers plunged into mist by the immaculate wings of swans that wounded us. On winter nights the strong wind from the east maddened us, in the summers we were lost in the agony of days that couldn’t die. We brought back these carved reliefs of a humble art. 2 Still one more well inside a cave. It used to be easy for us to draw up idols and ornaments to please those friends who still remained loyal to us. The ropes have broken; only the grooves on the well’s lip remind us of our past happiness: the fingers on the rim, as the poet put it. The fingers feel the coolness of the stone a little, Then the body’s fever prevails over it and the cave stakes its soul and loses it every moment, full of silence, without a drop of water. 3 Remember the baths where you were murdered I woke with this marble head in my hands; it exhausts my elbow and I don’t know where to put it down. It was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the dream so our life became one and it will be very difficult for it to separate again. I look at the eyes: neither open nor closed I speak to the mouth which keeps trying to speak I hold the cheeks which have broken through the skin. That’s all I’m able to do. My hands disappear and come towards me mutilated. 4 Argonauts And a soul if it is to know itself must look into its own soul: the stranger and enemy, we’ve seen him in the mirror. They were good, the companions, they didn’t complain about the work or the thirst or the frost, they had the bearing of trees and waves that accept the wind and the rain accept the night and the sun without changing in the midst of change. They were fine, whole days they sweated at the oars with lowered eyes breathing in rhythm and their blood reddened a submissive skin. Sometimes they sang, with lowered eyes as we were passing the deserted island with the Barbary figs to the west, beyond the cape of the dogs that bark. If it is to know itself, they said it must look into its own soul, they said and the oar’s struck the sea’s gold in the sunset. We went past many capes many islands the sea leading to another sea, gulls and seals. Sometimes disconsolate women wept lamenting their lost children and others frantic sought Alexander the Great and glories buried in the depths of Asia. We moored on shores full of night-scenes, the birds singing, with waters that left on the hands the memory of a great happiness. But the voyages did not end. Their souls became one with the oars and the oarlocks with the solemn face of the prow with the rudder’s wake with the water that shattered their image. The companions died one by one, with lowered eyes. Their oars mark the place where they sleep on the shore. No one remembers them. Justice 5 We didn’t know them deep down it was hope that said we’d known them since early childhood. We saw them perhaps twice and then they took to the ships: cargoes of coal, cargoes of grain, and our friends lost beyond the ocean forever. Dawn finds us beside the tired lamp drawing on paper, awkwardly, painfully, ships mermaids or sea shells; at dusk we go down to the river because it shows us the way to the sea; and we spend the nights in cellars that smell of tar. Our friends have left us perhaps we never saw them, perhaps we met them when sleep still brought us close to the breathing wave perhaps we search for them because we search for the other life, beyond the statues. 6 M.R. The garden with its fountains in the rain you will see only from behind the clouded glass of the low window. Your room will be lit only by the flames from the fireplace and sometimes the distant lightning will reveal the wrinkles on your forehead, my old Friend. The garden with the fountains that in your hands was a rhythm of the other life, beyond the broken statues and the tragic columns and a dance among the oleanders near the new quarries — misty glass will have cut it off from your life. You won’t breathe; earth and the sap of the trees will spring from your memory to strike this window struck by rain from the outside world. 7 South wind Westward the sea merges with a mountain range. From our left the south wind blows and drives us mad, the kind of wind that strips bones of their flesh. Our house among pines and carobs. Large windows. Large tables for writing you the letters we’ve been writing so many months now, dropping them into the space between us in order to fill it up. Star of dawn, when you lowered your eyes our hours were sweeter than oil on a wound, more joyful than cold water to the palate, more peaceful than a swan’s wings. You held our life in the palm of your hand. After the bitter bread of exile, at night if we remain in front of the white wall your voice approaches us like the hope of fire; and again this wind hones a razor against our nerves. Each of us writes you the same thing and each falls silent in the other’s presence, watching, each of us, the same world separately the light and darkness on the mountain range and you. Who will lift this sorrow from our hearts? Yesterday evening a heavy rain and again today the covered sky burdens us. Our thoughts – like the pine needles of yesterday’s downpour bunched up and useless in front of our doorway — would build a collapsing tower. Among these decimated villages on this promontory, open to the south wind with the mountain range in front of us hiding you, who will appraise for us the sentence to oblivion? Who will accept our offering, at this close of autumn? 8 What are they after, our souls, travelling on the decks of decayed ships crowded in with sallow women and crying babies unable to forget themselves either with the flying fish or with the stars that the masts point our at their tips; grated by gramophone records committed to non-existent pilgrimages unwillingly murmuring broken thoughts from foreign languages. What are they after, our souls, travelling on rotten brine-soaked timbers from harbour to harbour? Shifting broken stones, breathing in the pine’s coolness with greater difficulty each day, swimming in the waters of this sea and of that sea, without the sense of touch without men in a country that is no longer ours nor yours. We knew that the islands were beautiful somewhere round about here where we grope, slightly lower down or slightly higher up, a tiny space. 9 The harbour is old, I can’t wait any longer for the friend who left the island with the pine trees for the friend who left the island with the plane trees for the friend who left for the open sea. I stroke the rusted cannons, I stroke the oars so that my body may revive and decide. The sails give off only the smell of salt from the other storm. If I chose to remain alone, what I longed for was solitude, not this kind of waiting, my soul shattered on the horizon, these lines, these colours, this silence. The night’s stars take me back to Odysseus, to his anticipation of the dead among the asphodels. When we moored here we hoped to find among the asphodels the gorge that knew the wounded Adonis. 10 Our country is closed in, all mountains that day and night have the low sky as their roof. We have no rivers, we have no wells, we have no springs, only a few cisterns — and these empty — that echo, and that we worship. A stagnant hollow sound, the same as our loneliness the same as our love, the same as our bodies. We find it strange that once we were able to build our houses, huts and sheep-folds. And our marriages, the cool coronals and the fingers, become enigmas inexplicable to our soul. How were our children born, how did they grow strong? Our country is closed in. The two black Symplegades close it in. When we go down to the harbours on Sunday to breathe freely we see, lit in the sunset, the broken planks from voyages that never ended, bodies that no longer know how to love. 11 Sometimes your blood froze like the moon in the limitless night your blood spread its white wings over the black rocks, the shapes of trees and houses, with a little light from our childhood years. 12 Bottle in the sea Three rocks, a few burnt pines, a lone chapel and farther above the same landscape repeated starts again: three rocks in the shape of a gateway, rusted, a few burnt pines, black and yellow, and a square hut buried in whitewash; and still farther above, many times over, the same landscape recurs level after level to the horizon, to the twilit sky. Here we moored the ship to splice the broken oars, to drink water and to sleep. The sea that embittered us is deep and unexplored and unfolds a boundless calm. Here among the pebbles we found a coin and threw dice for it. The youngest won it and disappeared. We put to sea again with our broken oars. 13 Hydra Dolphins banners and the sound of cannons. The sea once so bitter to your soul bore the many-coloured and glittering ships it swayed, rolled and tossed them, all blue with white wings, once so bitter to your soul now full of colours in the sun. White sails and sunlight and wet oars struck with a rhythm of drums on stilled waves. Your eyes, watching, would be beautiful, your arms, reaching out, would glow, your lips would come alive, as they used to, at such a miracle: that’s what you were looking for what were you looking for in front of ashes or in the rain in the fog in the wind even when the lights were growing dim and the city was sinking and on the stone pavement the Nazarene showed you his heart, what were you looking for? why don’t you come? what were you looking for? 14 Three red pigeons in the light inscribing our fate in the light with colours and gestures of people we once loved. 15 Quid πλατανων opacissimus Sleep wrapped you in green leaves like a tree you breathed like a tree in the quiet light in the limpid spring I looked at your face: eyelids closed, eyelashes brushing the water. In the soft grass my fingers found your fingers I held your pulse a moment and felt elsewhere your heart’s pain. Under the plane tree, near the water, among laurel sleep moved you and scattered you around me, near me, without my being able to touch the whole of you — one as you were with your silence; seeing your shadow grow and diminish, lose itself in the other shadows, in the other world that let you go yet held you back. The life that they gave us to live, we lived. Pity those who wait with such patience lost in the black laurel under the heavy plane trees and those, alone, who speak to cisterns and wells and drown in the voice’s circles. Pity the companion who shared our privation and our sweat and plunged into the sun like a crow beyond the ruins, without hope of enjoying our reward. Give us, outside sleep, serenity. 16 The name is Orestes On the track, once more on the track, on the track, how many times around, how many blood-stained laps, how many black rows; the people who watch me, who watched me when, in the chariot, I raised my hand glorious, and they roared triumphantly. The froth of the horses strikes me, when will the horses tire? The axle creaks, the axle burns, when will the axle burst into flame? When will the reins break, when will the hooves tread flush on the ground on the soft grass, among the poppies where, in the spring, you picked a daisy. They were lovely, your eyes, but you didn’t know where to look nor did I know where to look, I, without a country, I who go on struggling here, how many times around? and I feel my knees give way over the axle over the wheels, over the wild track knees buckle easily when the gods so will it, no one can escape, what use is strength, you can’t escape the sea that cradled you and that you search for at this time of trial, with the horses panting, with the reeds that used to sing in autumn to the Lydian mode the sea you cannot find no matter how you run no matter how you circle past the black, bored Eumenides, unforgiven. 17 Astyanax Now that you are leaving, take the boy with you as well, the boy who saw the light under the plane tree, one day when trumpets resounded and weapons shone and the sweating horses bent to the trough to touch with wet nostrils the green surface of the water. The olive trees with the wrinkles of our fathers the rocks with the wisdom of our fathers and our brother’s blood alive on the earth were a vital joy, a rich pattern for the souls who knew their prayer. Now that you are leaving, now that the day of payment dawns, now that no one knows whom he will kill and how he will die, take with you the boy who saw the light under the leaves of that plane tree and teach him to study the trees. 18 I regret having let a broad river slip through my fingers without drinking a single drop. Now I’m sinking into the stone. A small pine tree in the red soil is all the company I have. Whatever I loved vanished with the houses that were new last summer and crumbled in the winds of autumn. 19 Even if the wind blows it doesn’t cool us and the shade is meagre under the cypress trees and all around slopes ascending to the mountains; they’re a burden for us the friends who no longer know how to die. 20 In my breast the wound opens again when the stars descend and become kin to my body when silence falls under the footsteps of men. These stones sinking into time, how far will they drag me with them? The sea, the sea, who will be able to drain it dry? I see the hands beckon each drawn to the vulture and the hawk bound as I am to the rock that suffering has made mine, I see the trees breathing the black serenity of the dead and then the smiles, so static, of the statues. 21 We who set out on this pilgrimage looked at the broken statues became distracted and said that life is not so easily lost that death has unexplored paths and its own particular justice; that while we, still upright on our feet, are dying, affiliated in stone united in hardness and weakness, the ancient dead have escaped the circle and risen again and smile in a strange silence. 22 So very much having passed before our eyes that even our eyes saw nothing, but beyond and behind was memory like the white sheet one night in an enclosure where we saw strange visions, even stranger than you, pass by and vanish into the motionless foliage of a pepper tree; having known this fate of ours so well wandering among broken stones, three or six thousand years searching in collapsed buildings that might have been our homes trying to remember dates and heroic deeds: will we be able? having been bound and scattered, having struggled, as they said, with non-existent difficulties lost, then finding again a road full of blind regiments sinking in marshes and in the lake of Marathon, will we be able to die as we should? 23 A little farther we will see the almond trees blossoming the marble gleaming in the sun the sea breaking into waves a little farther, let us rise a little higher. 24 Here end the works of the sea, the works of love. Those who will some day live here where we end — should the blood happen to darken in their memory and overflow — let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels, let them turn the heads of the victims towards Erebus: We who had nothing will school them in serenity.

Aluminum sky. Only November Leaks into early frost Like a ruptured jug Of gas. I’d rather hold Onto this road with pliers Than have another face of you Frisk my heart. Cool hands, The touch of every moon Is crucial and incomplete As a sponge bath. Leaving A backbone of lights Behind me, a blinking string Of pelts in fox country, I long to slice through Connecticut’s middle, marbled And pink as medium-rare beef. I dream you.