Inspired by the Life and Work of Malcolm Morley
and Based Loosely on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
And who but thee be the glittering eye
In route to eternal regions south of here,
In ships sanctified by war and ice,
By forged blood and broken tie?
Like a shroud did swoon the ship’s sail
And then lift skyward toward World’s Wound;
Hardly bird or horse could compete with such a soul,
Driven to limits by limits’ blood-deep folds.
And yet, the deed darkest you could not avoid,
The killing of love’s forlorn embrace was writ
Like the sky in waters both shallow and deep:
The heart is nothing if it is not by such acts torn apart.
But in going against nature you were not,
You are not, alone, for whom among us has not killed
The thing closest to his heart in order that it might,
As the wind, redefine right and retake its root?
For how is every act not an act of art that would
In the end bring the equator itself to a neutral point,
Where sky and sea might suddenly stop to sanctify the way
For the soul’s part: a silence unbearable, a desert’s tongue,
To slap against our teeth and swallow the sun,
Leaving only the moon and the stars, a blind man’s eyes,
To forage like animals in distant sands of the sea
For the parts of an animal that once screamed like ours?
In hope we pretend and in denial seek,
For we are wizards of the darkness
In the light and seek nothing but the fire
And the rain that burns and washes us deep.
Did she with your bones, innocent and white,
Play dice and lose and then rejoice —
Because she knew what you could not know so slight,
That the death we choose is the death we splice
Like flesh upon the bones we hurl so sprightly
Against the walls of the heart,
A love and a hatred we undertake so lightly,
Like a voyage by ships beyond the sea?
And my heart cries out to thee,
A companion at sea, alone amid the shadows
And apparitions, a wraith among images,
At the edge of the bleached sands of the soul.
And the more the lid of the eye closes upon them,
The more the screams spread across the skies of the world;
And from the agony and the curse of truths beyond the truth,
We are left with the demise of all that calls out beyond itself.
So let us like worms amid the sickly clouds,
Like wings amid the mud,
Like blood in the eye of the fiercest lover,
Race to lift the curtain from soul’s horror.
And when we lift the great curtain from our eyes,
What do we dare see, what dares to show itself:
Sail of the night burning at midday or dream of the dream
Assailed by interpretations of the light?
Lips and limbs and worms splayed in the sand
Dream that they are like the wind raging through
The branches of the body, and the stars, like hungry mouths,
Grind the dying organ of the moon in their teeth.
Are these groans the dreams dying men dream?
Is this lifeless wind the breath of the dream stillborn?
And what is the shadow of this ship in the desert — a brush
Or a tree or the blood of a child that cannot return to thee?
There is much we cannot bring back,
Nor should, because it is dead, and much
That we dread and cannot hold back, and must kill,
Over and over again, although it is already dead.
Fly, fly, aboard the ancient ship of the mother,
Until you cannot fly; fly, fly, until she cannot fly, and fall both
Into the yellow arms of the sea, into the blue arms of the night,
Until you can do nothing but forgive each other.
Fall, fall, as if into a deep sleep, into a dream,
The end of which you cannot reach: therein lies the dream
Of your dream, the dream of your art, all the pain and loss
Wiped clean by the blood, by the painting, of the albatross.
And now, after centuries of time, all about you
Lie the bones of the living and the dead,
And the snow upon the branch and over the hill,
And the screams in your head come no more.
Only the hymn of the desert and the sea doth approach,
And the wind like a calming hand doth guide the sail
And the dune shadow, as the ship like a prayer doth approach
The soul which desires neither water nor sand.
We are as if one, this great ship of the mother
And the son, the father and the daughter, and we move
Through the darkest of nights as if the soul had brought
To the earth for the first time the great dream of death.