I
Here, then,
Where waters spin
Fleeing from men
Round quartz and spar,
The rock shelves in,
Opening the cave mouth, far
Above the waves’ morass of seaweed, sticks and tar.
Gulls crying
Pure anguish now,
This, that way flying,
Swoop, stall, proclaim
In trespass how
Under their nests we came
To read such hieroglyphs as give the void a name.
Foot-crossed,
The limestone bridge
Lets fall the tossed
Waves with a roar.
From ridge to ridge
Of rock we go before;
Then the receding tide behind us locks the door.
We crouch,
As though a hand
Of kindred touch
Almost in reach,
Knowing our planned
Spadework, laid hold on each,
Or finger signed us dumb, to hear forgotten speech.
Fires fling
Shades on the wall,
Flicker and cling
To earth, being made
By man. Birds call.
White wings on water fade,
And seething waves rush up, swift to consume the shade.
II
Too deep inside ourselves
Lies Elsinore.
Where weapons shone,
Stubborn ore,
Danegeld of our attention
Leaps to the muscles tension
As the spade delves.
While the gymnastic shade
Compasses effort
To track pierced veins,
Rock’s retort
Answers the shoulders’ strains.
Fossil of mole remains;
The ghost is laid.
Still we persist, to extract
Bone or ceramic,
Glazed by unseeing
Cataract, then quick
With vision’s vital spring.
We stoop to break time’s ring
And show clear fact.
Without this toil no city
Finds equilibrium;
No foil discovers
Quick and dumb,
Nor forty thousand brothers
Time’s truth, where one grave smothers
Identity.
Still the rock’s reticence
Pulls our awareness
Downward, to ease
The forbears’ stress
Of soul, till mindstrength frees
Those inmost rarities, True and intense.
Impulsive invader,
III
the wave from the gully now fills the whole
seacave, feeling
Nothing of mind in the sleek black walls, no singular touch or
caress.
One wave racing back calls another that hurls the white spray to
the ceiling,
Subduing with trumpets of sea all that lived in the cavern’s recess.
So the light-headed spray thrown back from the breakers reports
what is not for man’s knowing;
Yet I, who enter above them, ignored by their deafening crash,
In the thunder and conflict of waves, and of waters endlessly
flowing,
Find peace in man’s counter-wave music, rejecting their turmoil
as trash.
IV
In the cave’s mouth, not far from the headland, breaking
Red clay stacked near stalagmites built by tears,
A dome darkened, unentered thousands of years,
Our fingers grope and sift,
While pick strikes, to break rock they cannot lift,
To ease the rift
Of forms embedded too fast to expect this waking.
And yet how fresh in shadow, under the pressure
Of shredding fingers, white in friable mould
As primrose under dark leaf, emerges cold
This that reveals its own
Fragile form, a clay-stemmed antelope’s bone
Fluting to stone
A vanishing note as hunters enter the fissure.
Far under, that breathing monster nuzzles the shady
Steep cliff at the height of summer’s tide.
Look up. Forget the youth mistaken for bride
In ochre. Salute the strong
Tang of seaweed, driftwood, spangle and thong:
Never so long
A wake sighed, as for Paviland’s Red Lady.
Life returns to the mother; and she, the daughter,
Knows in the desert what gentler touch is here,
Crumbling, close to that pendant worn in the ear
Found in yesterday’s stint.
Bone whitens, quickly distinguished from flint,
Like flesh, the print
Of all that eludes and is different, thirsting for water.
NOTE: The Red Lady of Paviland, the name given to the earliest skeleton unearthed in Britain, because of red ochre rock deposits mistaken for ritual dyes, was first thought to be the skeleton of a girl, but was later identified as that of a youth of about eighteen.
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