Onstage

I Sun, you play with me and yet, this is no dance this such nudity blood nearly barbarous home- less: then—

II At the semaphore sound they came, the pure, the journeymen far, bearers of mandates with offerings white of towels heaping and fresh. Their lilt and lall were lost to me. I did not expect them. I awed. I stammered, “I love the spectacle.” Immediately the mussel was peopled with eyes fixed to its ribbing, I turned then to the dank parquet where there came down that moment a light to reveal a scene set for some famous murder.

III And you, what did you seek? Barely arisen your aspect still heavy with stammer the linens forsaken and cold the baths, they were cold and vengeful your hair was heavy and wet dripping in droplets bare down your back that glistened in pools round your navel exposed to the dew on the long of your legs and your feet so nude to the grass and the dark earth. They, three personae of the lion-muzzler came. They gyred for you your eyes like two tragic urchins like two tumid stones those dark cherries, your breasts. (Was this the spectacle’s artifice, I cannot say) They howled and they tore in the howling the wind. You, rooted, remained. The daggers whirred in the drawing the colonnade burst with their shrieks. And you, rooted, remained, cypress. They clutched and they clambered they sought a spot where to strike when at last, you spoke, “This handful of rain is yours for the taking for I am the sea.”

IV The sea: what is become of the sea? I lingered too long on overgrown slopes I was blinded by light-bugs. And now at this tip of the ocean I expect for a man for a wrack or a skiff.

But does the sea welt? In the twilight white, the fin of a dolphin tore her ethereal web. Or again, the tip of the wing of a gull.

And yet her sway was sweet when, a child, I let myself swell in her plunge, or again, a bold young man, searching for patterns in sea-stones schemas and rhythms. And the old beard with bastel and wand he came and he said unto me “I am your topos and tropos. It fares that perhaps I am no one. Perhaps, it fares that I am whatever you want.”

V What sort were they that heard at midday the whirring of daggers? What sort that came cavalier with the kindling and the torches? They washed their hands of it. Who unfastened the woman the infant and the house? Implicate none. Rack. The hooves they beat in the fleeing. They gouged their martyrdom out with their eyes witness to no thing.

VI When will you speak again? Our words are not our own, are the children of many and lost. Like that pine tree that stands on a cliff by the sea holds in its warped silhouette the shape of the wind after the wind has crashed out, so too our words the shape of the baffled dead. What words did they speak on that night When the stars weightlessly trampled your frame, such nudity, the swan, the archer, the scorpion? What did they require? And where will you be when once again onto the glade there comes down for a moment a light?

VII And yet, under the black-lipped gaze of the cave on the further shore, suns in your eyes and rooks on your wings, you were. You suffered the other burden, you loved, the other dawn, you were there, the other birth, you rose up again. There you were becoming anew, in the overfull instant of time, moment by moment, a drip of sap, the stalactite, the stalagmite.