In the Direction of the Beginning

In the light tent in the swinging field in the great spring evening, / near the sea and the shingled boat with a mast of cedar-wood, the / hinderwood decked with beaks and shells, a folded, salmon sail, and / two finned oars; with gulls in one flight high over, stork, pelican, and sparrow, flying to the ocean's end and the first grain of a time-less / land that spins on the head of a sand glass, a hoop of feathers / down the dark of the spring in a topsy-turvy year; as the rocks in / history, by every feature and scrawled limb, eye of a needle, shadow / of a nerve, cut in the heart, by rifted fibre and clay thread, recorded for the rant of odyssey the dropping of the bay-leaf toppling of the / oak-tree splintering of the moonstone against assassin avatar undead / and numbered waves, a man was born in the direction of the beginning.

And out of sleep, where the moon had raised him through the / mountains in her eyes and by the strong, eyed arms that fall behind her, full of tides and fingers, to the blown sea, he wrestled over the / edge of the evening, took to the beginning as a goose to the sky, and / called his furies by their names from the wind-drawn index of the / grave and waters. Who was this stranger who came like a hailstone, / cut in ice, a snow-leafed seabush for her hair, and taller than a cedarmast, the north white rain descending and the whale-driven sea cast / up to the caves of the eye, from a fisherman's city on the floating / island? She was salt and white and travelling as the field, on one / blade, swung with its birds around her, evening centred in the never-still / heart, he heard her hands among the treetops-a feather dived, her fingers flowed over the voices-and the world went drowning / down through a siren stranger's vision of grass and waterbeasts and / snow. The world was sucked to the last lake's drop; the cataract of / the last particle worried in a lather to the ground, as if the rain from / heaven had let its clouds fall turtle-turning like a manna made of the soft-bellied seasons, and the hard hail, falling, spread and flustered / in a cloud half flower half ash or the comb-footed scavenger's / wind through a pyramid raised high with mud or the soft slow drift / of mingling steam and leaves. In the exact centre of enchantment / he was a shoreman in deep sea, lashed by his hair to the eye in the cyclop breast, with his swept thighs strung among her voice; white / bears swam and sailors drowned to the music she scaled and drew / with hands and fables from his upright hair; she plucked his terror / by the ears, and bore him singing into light through the forest of the / serpent-haired and the stone-turning voice. Revelation stared back over its transfixed shoulder. Which was her genesis, the last spark / of judgement or the first whale's spout from the waterland? The / conflagration at the end, a burial fire jumping, a spent rocket hot on / its tail, or, where the first spring and its folly climbed the sea barriers / and the garden locks were bruised, capped and douting water over / the mountain candle-head? Whose was the image in the wind, the print on the cliff, the echo knocking to be answered? She was orioled / and serpent-haired. She moved in the swallowing, salty field, / the chronicle and the rocks, the dark anatomies, the anchored sea / itself. She raged in the mule's womb. She faltered in the galloping / dynasty. She was loud in the old grave, kept a still, quick tongue in the sun. He marked her outcast image, mapped with a nightmare's / foot in poison and framed against the wind, print of her thumb that / buckled on its hand with a webbed shadow, interrogation of the familiar / echo: which is my genesis, the granite fountain extinguishing / where the first flame is cast in the sculptured world, or the bonfire maned like a lion in the threshold of the last vault? One voice then / in that evening travelled the light and water waves, one lineament / took on the sliding moods, from where the gold green sea cantharis / dyes the trail of the octopus one venom crawled through foam, and / from the four map corners one cherub in an island shape puffed the clouds to sea.