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CvK |
Watermarks |
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II. The Cargo |
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And there the
horizon, and now
the waiting. Gathered on the
shore, the night about our
shoulders, watching the nets fall upon the thalassa-whispering sea. It is up! Caught
in maze of twine, below the
quivering water, she scanned our faces
and set forth. It is not
forgotten. My eyes are lifted up unto
the hills and never set. The light, changer
of our coinage, drawn to a needle
point pierces the gate and we
remember (clear on mind’s screen, a vellum
stretch, a hemp sway across canvas
furl). Breathless the fishermen scar
in many casts the face lost in
her self-inturning, too well
understood to be worshipped yet in the
fine-mortised whole, complete though stamped and
over-stamped is still the
change, undebased and unassayable. Many the bulls
encompass the night, their arcs, their
heat melt as wax belief and we, guttered,
are poured out like water: in dust a delta of
interwoven fibres strained in not
forgetting. This
the way: In nets
flung out to make the water tremble with
the draught of the holy catch: heiratic ichtus, fish, cold
sacrifice out of
and of all elements, opened on hill
and shore for the woman riding on the
crescent moon, hair coiled about her face. Yet
how well we know her. The
blue of peplos-fluted sky conceals her passage arching over all. We have
one body and one blood, and a thousand
songs are on in the echo of the hills, the rest is ply of light. Love! You could not call it that. Not love! It is
for you we dance in a beat pulsed by the
real of night with light as mandrels birl out, we are
slender shafts and our glance flames off. And this too the way: There
stands memory warmed in the dark by your
breath and led by fine-boned, shell-tipped fingers. Not
alone in night. Colours
cling one to the other, yet line divides
plane from plane and it is easier to
think essences are cleaved by axe-fall, splintering all into lustre slivers. Not this way: not with too much light! Gift of
the sun cuts her path with seven swords
and we are blooded in the hunt of night. Scimitar moon, now nets are slit, skims above blackened by night-light hills. Yet we
gaze while scaled fish pour out to streak the stone-grey sea red. This the way: in ritual on the shore: Foetal
gills quivering in the shock of remembering.
For there with horn of dune and thew shift it is ever the same. Come
take a cord! The net must sing through air to water. Quick cast on one,
only one flick from arms untiring in
sinew-slip, in the drama’s sacred act repeated
on periphery points around orchestra
in cymballing circle clash, wave
crash on records written within anemone whorl,
wind-rose; and this too born of surge of sea in blood. Here the hiss of sea by night and we remember. There the horizon and the waiting. Tongues
cleave to salt, earth taste, in song
we turn from the beach, step on shingle though the obscuring mist of dawn. |
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