let itself slide off on a warm wave of evening air, as a swimmer slides off a warm rock into a swirling sea. As I thought this it turned and looked steadily at me with very round golden eyes. I went to it and it squatted low, like a hen settling in a smother of outstretched sheltering wings over its eggs, and I slid on to its back, and no sooner than I was safely there than it glided off into the air, and we were dropping down lightly over the rocky sliding hill, and the waterfalls and then over the deep forest now silent with the approach of night. The bird’s back, its wing span was ten or twelve feet. I sat up, with a fistful of feathers to keep me steady, but a wind that came sweeping up from the sea nearly sent me toppling off and down over and over to the treetops, so I lay face down, with my arms on either side of the bird just above where the wings joined. The slopes of white feathers were sun-warmed still, and slippery, and smelled clean and wholesome like a hen’s egg when it is fresh. The light shone off the white feathers immediately below my eyes like sun off a snowfield, and I turned away my face and laid it to one side, and looked down past the bird’s neck and shoulders and we swooped out over the sea and sped along the waves’ crests that still, even though all the land between shore and the plateau’s edge was plunged in dark, sparked off light from the setting sun. It was a red sun in a ruddy sky, to match the carnage that went on in the city beneath it—which I could just see, white walls and columns in miniature, miles away, high through darkening air. And on we went over the waves and I breathed in great gulps of cold salty air that swept my lungs free of dirt and blood. And on we went until the shore and continent beyond had dwindled to a narrow edge of dark against a sky that was piled high and thick with glowing clouds, and then as my bird dipped one wing to swerve around and back I cried No, not yet, go on, and the bird sped on, while the air whistled past my cold-burning ears and I could taste the salt spray on my lips and beard. And on and on we went, and then I turned over carefully on my back, with my arms bent back and clutching at the finer feathers in the warm caverns under the bird’s beating or balancing wings, and I looked up into a star-sprinkled sky where the moon was with her back to the earth, and showing a slice of its edge one finger wider than yesterday’s to remind me of my sorrow and my failure. And now in front of us was the coast of Portugal and there was Conchita on her headland looking out to sea. Behind her the red blotch of new suburbs spread out like measles, and below the sea pranced and tossed. She was singing or half-chanting, or even speaking—for it was halting, worrying, blocked song—which showed poor Conchita was as little fitted for her nunhood as she had been happy in my arms,
“Come on, shout!” the brass sun said,
The peacock sea screamed blue, the turkey houses red,
Sun and sea, they challenged “Come!”
The earth sang out, but I was dumb.
Slow, slow, my feet down thick sand dunes,
Curled shells recalling old sea tunes
Cut my slow feet until they bled.
“Who cannot dance must bleed,” they said.
Not ape, nor God, to swing from tree to tree,
Or bid the sea be still from fear of me,
Divided, dwarfed, a botched thing in between,
I watched the sky burn on, the grass glow deeper green.
To sing! To sing! To squeeze the flaring afternoon
Like warm fruit in my hand! Then fling it out in tune!
To take the waves, the freedom of their beat,
And dance that out on sea-taught feet.
But blood and nerves are crucified too long
That I should find a sweet release in song.
Not I to sing as free as birds
Whose throat forms only human words.
Renounce the sea, the crooning sands,
My ease, bought not by loosed feet, hands,
Or love which breaks the mind in pain
To make the flesh shine whole again.
These are mine still, but only in the long
Cold reaches where the mind coils strong
To re-create in patience what the slow
Limbs, bound, knew simply as a song, but long ago.