darling, dearest, dead.

Tintagel is haunted. It is haunted not by Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table but by that moment in our lives when imagination caught fire and blazed. The ghosts on this rock are the great army of Englishmen and Englishwomen who in their youth believed in Excalibur and wept in sorrow beside that mere as the three hooded queens came in their barge with a crying that ‘shivered to the tingling stars’ to bear the dying king to Avalon.

No flinching then at fate. No wedding guests. No wake. No keen. No panegyric. I close my eye on the sun. I turn my back on the light.

But I have wanted              As I want when I look at the painting,                             To unhouse my body. I have wanted the kind of grace God gives              Only to the drowned

I do not want revenge, I do not want expiation, I only want to ask someone how I was lost, how I was lost