That noon we banged like tubs in a blast from Hell’s mouth.
Axes donged on casques and the dead steamed through their
armor,
their wounds frying. Horses screamed like cats, and men
ran through their own dust like darks howling. My country
went up in flames to the last rick and roof, and the smoke
was my own breath in me scorching the world bare.
We fought. May the clerk eat his own hand in fire forever
who wrote I would not face Arthur. Iron sparks iron.
We fought as we had been made, iron to iron. Who takes
a field from me tastes his own blood on it.
Three times I knocked him from the saddle. What’s a king?
he’d had the best mare ever danced on turf
and couldn’t sit that saddle. Well, I rode her:
king’s mount from bell to cockcrow while bed, castle, and country
shook under us, and he snored holiness to a sleeping sword
from the fairies. Excalibur’s ex-horseman. Yes, I fought him:
I took my damnation as it came and would have hacked
a thousand Arthurs small to mount her again.
He did better by a warhorse. That saddle, at least, he knew
how to climb into. Iron to iron he charged, and could have
knocked
a castle over. But still a fool, too pure for a feint
or sidestep. Three times I dumped him with his ribs stove
and could have finished him backhand, but reined and waited
with my own head split and a puddle of blood in my pants.
The fourth, he hove dead already into the saddle and came on.
But even a king won’t work with no blood in him:
his point dropped till it grounded, and poled him
over his horse’s rump. And I did not rein but took him
clean in air, though I broke my arm to do it. And there he lay:
my two horns on his head, my third through his back.
What can a clerk know of the day of dead kings and dead coun
tries?
I blew and no one answered. The men were dead and
scarcely boys enough left to carry a king’s bones
to the smoke of the burned chapel. What other burial
was done that day was done by crows and gypsies. And in my
heart:
where would I find another worth damnation?
I never turned back and I never looked back. My country
burned behind me and a king lay skewered on a charred altar,
his sword in blood at my feet. I took it up and flung it
into a swamp. He had bled into it: why hold back his sword?
No fairy arm reached out of the muck to catch it. That
was another life and spent, and what was there left to save?
Except the mare! Even bled down to dust and my bones shivered,
my veins pumped at the thought of her. Why else
had I cracked king, castle, and my own head? I rode,
and mended as I rode–mended enough-enough to be still alive
or half alive-when I found her. And when I had waited
a cool two hours at her door, what came to meet me?
A nun! Eight thousand men dead and the best iron in England
black in the burned stones of a burned shire, and my own bones
stitched in by nothing but scars, and there she stood,
black as the day we had made of the world, and gave me
-a litany of tears! A whore of heaven wailing
from a black cassock as if she stood naked in a hollow tree!
With her eyes turned in unseeing: as if to Heaven:
as if there were no world and we had not dared it
beyond damnation! That was the death of all:
she dared not even look at what we were! And for this
I had fed the best meat in England to carrion crows
and left a crown in mud for a gypsy’s picking.
I did not turn back and I did not look back.
I had left a king and country dead without turning.
Should I turn now for a mare? Let Heaven ride her spavined:
I had the heat of her once, and I’d sooner
have turned Saracen and ripped the crosses from Europe
than deny my blood spilled into his in the field that made us.
Once of a world she danced like flame, and the man who would
not
die to be scorched there was dead already. Dead as the clerk
who rhymed us to a moral. There is no moral. I was. He was. She
was.
Blood is a war. I broke my bones on his, iron to iron.
And would again. Without her. Stroke for stroke. For his own
sake.
Because no other iron dared me whole.
Leave a Reply