September Cruise
(for Tom, Les, Cecil)

Traverse the beach, from your feet always

a light-path on the water reaches

towards sun, moon,

fisher’s lamp, recurring flashes

of lighthouse beam.  The path is always

there, and your own.

Tread it…  No.  No bodily pathway

this glittering skein the light-source casts you

… and yet… and yet

reaching you so, it surely should be

laid there for you somehow to tread it

with lightened feet.

Hewn from the rock

huge he lies,

relaxed and watchful,

serene over the centuries.

Pirates and empires pass.

Life changes and goes on,

hard among these terraces of vine and thin corn,

inescapable stone.

The lion lies, is as he always was.

High on the precipitous promontory

dark trees gather, and the white monastery

looks east over the sea.

East we fare, and the rock-bound dreaming island

shrinks and hazes, and dreaming ghosts of islands

rise half perceptibly.

World is numberless shades of blue, breaking

to greys, to silver, white.  A light wind makes

the flat sea wrinkle,

suddenly kindles

stars, firefruits fallen

from the sun’s high tree.

Today the sea is milk, milky blue

hardly lined off from the milky sky

except where islands lie

hardly distinguishable through

the bluish haze,

the milkiness.

Above the dark harbour the crescent moon,

and just beside her bright Jupiter.

We watch them move

slowly, inevitably, steadily

together.  At last the planet’s fire

begins to weaken, flicker, vanishes

in night, marking the unseen edge,

the moon’s dark circle

which joins her crescent-tips.

Then we notice

how far, while we were watching them, these two

have sunk towards the ships.

We watch the crescent set,

know her concealed companion setting too.

Block half freed from the quarry.  God hardly half freed,

adumbrated in the block.  He does not heed

precise feature, upright stance.  He is here in the block,

itself still rooted in the quarry rock,

the marble mountain.  He lies below the face

they chiselled back to free the block.  This is his place.

Squatting on waterskis, a golden boy

ploughs with his rump a furrow in the blue.

The Sea-god, ardour kindled by the view,

the beauteous youth doth cruelly enjoy.

Stepped and corridored the town

white to blindness clothes its steep

hill under the wrecked keep.

At the white alley’s end you look

straight on sea.

Stepping further on, look down

where a church sits small, alone

on a small promontory

and the sea-swell swings its shock

against rough rock.