138
PARTISAN REVIEW
She longs among horses and angels,
The rainbow-fish bend in her joys,
Floated the lost cathedral
Chimes of the rocked buoys.
Where the anchor rode like a gull
Miles over the moonstruck boat
A squall of birds bellowed and fell,
A cloud blew the rain from its
throat;
He saw the storm smoke out to kill
With fuming bows and ram of ice,
Fire on starlight, rake Jesu's stream;
And nothing shone on the water's
face
But the oil and bubble of the moon,
Plunging and piercing in his course
The lured fish under the foam
Witnessed with a kiss.
Whales in the wake like capes and
Alps
Quaked the sick sea and snouted
deep,
Deep the great bushed bait with
raining lips
Slipped the fins of those humpbacked
tons
And fled their love in a weaving dip.
Oh, Jericho was falling in their
lungs!
She nipped and dived in the nick of
love,
Spun on a spout like a long-legged
ball
Till every beast blared down in a
swerve
Till every turtle crushed from his
shell
Till every bone in the scuttled grave
Rose and crowed and fell!
Good luck to the hand on the rod,
There is thunder under its thumbs;
Gold gut is a lightning thread,
His fiery reel sings off its flames,
The whirled boat in the burn of his
blood
Is crying from nets to knives,
Oh the shearwater birds and their
boatsized brood
Oh the bulls of Biscay and their
calves
Are making under the green, laid
veil
The long-legged beautiful bait their
wives.
Break the black news and paint on
a sail
Huge weddings in the waves,
Over the wakeward-flashing spray
Over the gardens of the floor
Clash out the mounting dolphin's
day,
My mast is a bell-spire,
Strike and smoothe, for my decks
are drums,
Sing through the water-spoken prow
The octopus walking into her limbs
The polar eagle with his tread of
snow.
From salt-lipped beak to the kick of
the stern
Sing how the seal has kissed her
dead!
The long, laid minute's bride drifts
on
Old in her cruel bed.
Over the graveyard in the water
Mountains and galleries beneath
Nightingale and hyena
Rejoicing for that drifting death
Sing and howl through sand and
anemone
Valley and sahara in a shell,
Oh all the wanting flesh his enemy
Thrown to the sea in the shell of a
girl
Is
~ld
as water and plain as an eel;
Always goodbye to the long-legged
bread
Scattered in the paths of his heels
For the salty birds fluttered and fed
