A cackling noise, as if of bitter mockery
descends in spirals onto my bent head.
The ground is scorched and swept by slanting shadows of pinasters,
and the sea, there in the distance, is obscured from sight
less by their branches than by bursts of sultry haze
which now and then erupt from cracked veins in the earth.
The boiling of the waters, choked on miles of sandbank, reaches me,
now muffled more, now less; or sometimes there’s a boom
and then a rain of spray on rocks.
The moment I look up, the racket overhead is still.
Two blue-white arrows, jays, shoot by
towards the tumult of the waters.

                                  *

Ancient sea, the voice which issues from your mouths
each time they open like green bells and then
suck back and melt away has made me drunk.
The house in which I passed my distant summers was beside you, as you know,
there in a sun-baked landscape where the air is clouded with mosquitoes.
In your presence, now as then, it is as if I’m turned to stone
and yet today I feel no longer worthy
of the solemn admonition of your breath.
You were the first to tell me
that the petty ferment of my heart was but a moment in your own;
that lying deep within me was your law, with all its hazards:
to be vast, to be diverse, yet to be fixed;
and so to purge myself of all uncleanness
just as you do when you toss upon the beach
amongst the cork, the seaweed and the starfish
all the useless debris drawn from your abyss.

                                  *

As I slid down the dry, steep slopes, remote by now
from damp days of the autumn which had swelled them,
sometimes my heart escaped the closed loop of the seasons,
the inexorable drip-drip-drip of time.
And yet a presage of you filled my soul;
you shocked me with a sudden gasp of air,
so still before, on rocks which lined the road.
I understood it now: the stone was trying to break free,
was reaching out to an invisible embrace;
hard matter sensed the wind’s next eddy, and it trembled;
tufts of eager reeds spoke shaking
to the hidden waters, yielding their assent.
You in your vastness were the suffering stones’ redeemer.
Your exultation made legitimate the fixity of finite things.
I stooped amongst the heaps of stones;
the salty air reached to my heart in gusts;
the sea’s brim was a game of rings.
Such is the joy of one stray lapwing
swooping from the occluded valley to the open shore.

                                  *

At times I’ve lingered in the dark, dank caves,
some vast, some narrow, which absorb your force,
their mouths, seen from within, an architect’s bold outlines
painted in by sky. Up from your breast,
amid a sound of thunder, airy temples soared,
lights shooting from their spires: a city made of glass,
suspended in pure blue, uncovering itself,
its fleeting veils discarded one by one, its rumble fading to a whisper.
Here was the dreamed-of homeland rising from the waves.
Emerging from confusion, here was clarity.
The exile was re-entering his uncorrupted country.
So it is that with your liberation, father,
he who watches you takes on a stringent rule of life.
To flee from it is pointless: if I try,
a very pebble, worn away, a hardened, nameless, suffering thing,
condemns me in my path, as does the formless wreckage
thrown down at the roadside by life’s swollen flood
and tangled up with straw and branches.
In the destiny now being prepared for me
I may perhaps find rest and safety, everlastingly.
This thought the wild, unresting sea repeats.
This thought is echoed in the softest breath of air.

                                   *

And there are times — they come upon us suddenly —
when your inhuman heart strikes fear in us
and seems remote from ours. Your music
is discordant from my own, your every movement hostile.
I fall in upon myself, I’m drained of strength,
your voice seems muffled. Motionless I stand
here on the shingle sloping down towards you
to the last steep bank which overhangs you,
crumbling, yellow, carved by runnels of rainwater.
My life now is this dry declivity, a means and not an end,
an open channel for the overflow of streams, inclined to slow erosion.
And it is a plant born out of all this devastation,
facing up to blows the sea strikes,
hanging on amid erratic blasts of wind.
This patch of grassless ground has split
so that a daisy could be born. In her
my spirit quavers as the sea assails me;
silence is still lacking from my life.
I watch the shimmering earth,
the air so clear it darkens,
and the feeling for the sea arising in me is perhaps
the rancour each boy feels towards his father.

                                  *

We don’t know what will become of us tomorrow:
a future filled with sadness or with joy? Perhaps our path
will lead to woodland glades, till then unvisited,
where murmurs the eternal fount of youth.
Or maybe we’ll descend into the furthest valley,
in the night, all recollection of the morning lost.
Perhaps we’ll even venture into foreign lands. We will forget the sun,
and from our minds the jingle-jangle of our rhymes will fade away.
Oh yes, the fable that explains our life will suddenly be changed
into a tale of such foreboding that it can’t be told!
Yet, father, you assure us of one thing, and it is this:
a little of your gift has passed for ever
into syllables we take with us, like humming bees.
We’ll travel far, but we’ll preserve an echo of your voice,
as grey grass in dark courtyards, squeezed
between the houses, yet recalls the sun.
One day, these noiseless words we learned from you,
sustained by weary times, by silences,
will seem as sapid, to a sympathetic heart, as Attic salt.

                                  *

I would have wanted to feel tough and elemental,
like the pebbles you revolve, gnawed by the brine;
a splinter outside time, a witness to a cold, unchanging will.
But I was different: a deliberating man,
attentive to the turmoil of this fleeting life in others, in himself;
a man reluctant to perform an action no-one later could undo.
I wanted to seek out
the evil force which eats away the world,
the little twist by which a lever brings
the universal mechanism to a stop;
I saw the liability of every present happening
to break up into pieces with a crash.
Following the track of one path, I still kept
the other in my heart, and felt its draw.
Maybe the clean cut of the knife was what I needed,
the capacity to make my mind up, to resolve.
I needed other books, not just your thundering page.
But I have no regrets; you still untie
the tangled knots inside me with your song.
And now your frenzied rapture rises to the stars.

                                  *

If only I could press into my laboured rhythm
some small portion of your wildness;
if only it were given me to tune
my stammer in accordance with your voices:
I who dreamed of stealing from you salty words
where art and nature mingle
so I could the better cry aloud
the melancholy of a boy grown old who shouldn’t have been thinking.
But all I have is hackneyed dictionary language,
and the secret voice which love dictates grows hoarse;
it coarsens into plaintive literature.
I only have these words
which give themselves like prostitutes to anyone who asks;
I only have these tired phrases
which tomorrow student hacks can steal from me
to force into their well-made verses.
And your roar increases, and the coming twilight
spreads across the sky its deepening blue.
When I attempt to think, my thoughts abandon me.
I have no senses, and no sense. I have no limit.

                                  *

Disperse this frail, complaining life,
if so you wish; wipe the slate clean.
I hope to rest inside your circle once again;
my aimless wanderings are done.
I came here as a witness to an ordering
which on my journey I forgot;
these words of mine don’t realise
that they swear allegiance to an unattainable event.
Yet always, when I caught the sound
of your soft backwash on the shore,
dismay took hold of me, as if I were a man
whose memory fails him when he calls to mind his home.
My lesson learned, less from your open glory
than from the almost silent breath of some of your deserted noons,
I yield to you in all humility. I’m nothing but a spark
which flies up from a beacon. I know this for sure:
to burn, just that, and nothing else, is my significance.