I
Since Naxos,
since the blond waters
sucked at the hidden shore, at the woven dead whose violence
is tethered without noise.
Since Naxos, even jeunesse is pallid in the drawn and ruined
sun.
The dead are woven in their stone jars
and buried en masse, markers on the raised beach,
its crust exposed inland by the sea.
Woof of reed and warp-thread of straw
encased within a loom of ribs, diaphragmed
and crowned with oystered soil.
Fishers after the ‘lights of love’, electric bursting of the
waterlamps,
they string their nets across the balsam-
white horizon, from tombed cupola to sunbowled
crematory beach, their spoil of blunt-nosed fish
rose-gilled fatties bleaching their dangled baskets
with shocked silver.
A flicker of landmarks
seen on the rebound of a wave;
woven decay in the burial urns.
And a harbor’s summer rain is unfastened whiteness,
narrows of spray hushing round the skiffs,
fastened tightly by lovers who would, havened
by the darkness overhead, make love beneath
the pier.
II
Pent traces,
lure of floral curl,
inked, pollen-
laden, bone-
wrapt
with a chiseler’s
wealthy art.
Love
hurls to
gain and
brace;
bodies dredged
from lakes;
violated,
drowned.
III
The long grass hinders and unlooms, makes tendril-suck at a
diadem, a flown bird’s quit bone.
No seen shred wrung, shed, and nothing flown dusk
now dusks darker still.
Damson sweetness,
roped with gold.
Over all the held fire,
flamed, splayed, reined flight, poled to palm the unpoured
starlight till the shadowed spark, the ashes’ pall.
Braids of foam
and spray fan to figure, finger the cleft of rock.
Downward pitch to pool bursts, clouds the roses deepset
in the labia of stone. Starlight, stripped and stark.
Noon hangs midday.
Hushed air wound in the star’s
bright hair.
This hard flaming, this hard
more-than-lovely light.
IV
Phallic and ambrosial,
I grappled with the faun’s music
her hair composed,
Ariadne the twice-consoled.
From the open terrace
into a private grove
to blaze marina in a white girdle
under a verdant sun,
in sight of the rivergod’s boudoir.
In the arms of a woman
on sea-locked Naxos,
I presaged loneliness,
the air loud with birds flying for the woods,
the foam-bright sea
patched with rose
and nipple-brown flowers.
To wake from a strident dream
into the sudden copper light,
the paralytic sun an idée fixe
and Ariadne a mere movement
through the blindness,
soon to shade my raving eyes
like a goddess.
Ariadne, who numbers me
among her lovers.