As we drove down the ramp from the boat
The sun flashed once
Or through hand-shieldedly twice;
In a silence out of a sound
We watched for channel-swimmers dim with grease,
Come, here, to the ale of the shallows.
Within a wind, a wind sprang slowly up.
Birds hovered where they were.
As they were there, the airstream of the cliffs
Overcame, came over them
In the sack-cloth and breast-beating gray
The king wears newly, at evening.
In a movement you cannot imagine
Of air, the gulls fall, shaken.
No stronger than the teeth in my head
Or a word laid bare
On chilling glass, the breathed stone over us rode.
From its top, the eye may sail,
Outgrowing the graven nerves
Of the brow’s long-thought-out lines,
To France, on its own color.
From a child’s tall book, I knew this place
The child must believe, with the king:
Where, doubtless, now, lay lovers
Restrained by a cloud, and the moon
Into force coming justly, above.
In a movement you cannot imagine
Of love, the gulls fall, mating.
We stopped; the birds hung up their arms
Beside the wind
So that they heeled; above, around us,
Their harp-strung feathers made
The sound, quickly mortal, of sighing.
We watched them in pure obsession.
Where they did move, we moved
Along the cliffs, the promenade,
The walls, the pebble beach,
And felt the inmost island turn,
In their cross-cut, wing-walking cries,
To a thing, as weeping, sensitive,
And haunted by the balancement of light
The king wears newly, in singing.
We wandered off from the car
In the light, half-sun,
Half-moon, in a worn-down shine out of stone,
And the taste of an iron ladle on the wind.
In the moon’s grimed, thumb-print silver
The anchor spoke through the bell,
Far out, the hour that hung in the sea.
I threw a slow-flying stone; it dropped
Inside the brilliant echo of a light.
In a great, clustered, overdrawn sigh
The gulls went up, on a raiment of wings
The king wears newly, in panic.
In a movement you cannot imagine
Of error, the gulls rise, wholly.
We climbed a wall they had flown.
Each light below
On water, quivered like a thing in a lathe.
In the heron crest of a lamp,
Among lights, in their treading motion,
The head of my reflection seemed to sing
A dark, quickened side of the truth.
I touched my wife. I saw my son, unborn,
Left living after me, and my Self,
There, freed of myself,
In a stricken shade dancing together,
As a wave rolled under the water,
Lifted and rose in our images
The king wears newly, redoubling.
Where we went in, all power failed the house.
I spooned-out light
Upon a candle-thread. My wife lay down.
Through the flaming, white-bread nerve
I peered from the eye of the mind.
No child from the windowed dark came forth
To the hand, in its pure-blooded fire,
But the basket glow of the crown.
The glass fetched white to a breath; I understood
How the crown must come from within:
Of water made, and a wheel,
And of the thing in flame that seems to pant.
In a movement you cannot imagine
Of mirrors, the gulls fall, hidden.
I lay in bed. One hand in its sleeve
Lay open, on my breath.
My shadow dancing stilly beneath me
Rose, through my form. I heard the bell,
In mist, step backwardly onto the waves.
The wind fell off, as candle-shade
Unraveled our walls like knitting, and I,
Undone, outstretched through the trampled shining
Of thousands of miles of the moon,
And the fallen king
Breathed like a nosebleed, there,
Two men wear newly, in hiding.
In a movement you cannot imagine
Of bloodshed, the gulls fall, inward.
I listened for the coming of a barge.
In a cat’s-cradling motion
Of oars, my father rocked, in the mist. He died;
He was dying. His whisper fell,
As I, beneath the grave. Below the drowned
I panted, in the pig-iron taste of my beard.
I yelled, as out of a bucket,
Through my fettered mask, before the dawn
When my arms, my big-footed legs would hang
From pot-hooks, strange and untimely.
The stone beat like a gull; my father’s voice
Came to life, in words, in my ear.
In a movement you cannot imagine
Of prison, the gulls turn, calling.
Believing, then, astoundedly, in a son,
I drew from tufted stone
My sword. I slew my murderer, Lightborn, on the stair:
With the flat of steel, I flashed
Him dead, through his eyes high-piled in the hood.
When the tide came in, I rose
And onto the curded dark climbed out.
In the cliffs, where creatures about me swam,
In their thin, slain, time-serving bones,
The heavy page, the animal print of the chalk,
With wounds I glittered, dazzling as a fish.
In my short-horned, wool-gathering crown
I came from the beasts to the kingdoms
The king wears newly, in passing.
The sun fell down, through the moon.
The dead held house.
I hove my father to my back
And climbed from his barrow, there.
Pride helped me pick a queen and bear a son.
The heroic drink of the womb
Broke, then, into swan-like song.
One came with sceptre, one with cup,
One goat-like back’d, and one with the head of a god.
My mask fell away, and my gyves.
Through my sons I leapt in my ghost
The king wears newly, on fire.
In a movement you cannot imagine
Of birth, the gulls fall, crying.
In the cloud-like, packed, and layered realm
I wept, when I would sing.
I laid my father down where he must lie,
And entered, again, in my passion,
An older, incredible shape
Becoming young, as the cliffs let fall within stone
Their shadow green down from the crest.
I stood on the clifftop, alone.
My father’s body in my heart
Like a buried candle danced. I saw it shed on the sea,
On the flats of water, far out:
A rough, selected brightness
Exchanging a flame for a wheel
The king wears slowly, in measure.
Birds drifted in my breath as it was drawn
From the stressing glitter
Of water. Where France becomes
Another blue lid for the eye,
I felt my green eyes turn
Surpassingly blue, of one great look upon distance.
The sword dissolved, in my hands; wings beat.
I watched them rise from my arms, and stood
Excited forever by love. I saw the child’s eye shine
From his book, a wave of justified light.
The prisons like organs moaned. In a death like life
I sang like a head on a pole.
In a movement you cannot imagine
Of emblems, the gulls fall, silent.
One foot shone to me, from the sun.
I felt the sun’s
Mortality increase. In the blown,
Brow-beating light, I woke, and saw the room
Arise like a yeast from the floor,
The window come down like a bee.
In the long-legged, warm-bodied bed
I thought of him who would tell
To himself, arising in his candle-cast bones:
Every man, every man
Not a king. It is I
The king wears newly, in lasting.
In a movement you cannot imagine
Of spells, the gulls fall, listening.
How shall the stranger wake
Who has issued from dark
With the king? With gulls asleep
In the blue-burning grass? And on the sea,
A blaze that is counting itself,
The white birds holding
Still, on the field of the cloth of gold,
On the self and soul of the air?
Who stands, big-footed with glory, yet,
With the sound falling out of his voice
And his voice half-way to his son
Whose breath Time holds, in a woman?
In a movement you cannot imagine
Of silence, the gulls fall, waiting.
Why not as a prince, who, as
From a distance, wakes?
Who turns from the regular mirror
To watch, at the flawing pane,
Pale fire on a hair-spring still burning
In the puddled socket, and the fishing flash
On the shuffled rock of a wave
Overturn, in an inlaid crash
In the window’s half-mirror, half-air
As he steps through this room from the sea?
A tossed, green crown on his head,
He combs down the hair of his spirit,
Which is dead, but for the eyes
The king wears newly, at thirty:
Yet who is he? Whom does he face, in reflection?
The stained-glass king,
Or the child, grown tall, who cried to earth and air,
To books and water: to sun and father and fire
And nothingness to come and crown him, here?
Or are they, both of them, and neither,
This straw-headed knave, in blue-printed blue-jeans
appearing:
Who, in exultant enderness upon a woman’s sleep
Onlooks, then leaps out the door, out of that
Up onto the sea-side path, and when the sheep-track
dies,
Two late and idle lovers in the grass
Kicks into love, and goes up the cliffs to be crowned?
In a movement you cannot imagine
Of England, the king smiles, climbing: running.
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