Full Fathom Five
Old man, you surface seldom. Then you come in with the tide's coming When seas wash cold, foam Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung, A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves Crest and trough. Miles long Extend the radical sheaves Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins Knotted, caught, survives The old myth of origins Unimaginable. You float near As keeled ice-mountains Of the the north, to be steered clear Of, not fathomed. All obscurity Starts with a danger: Your dangers are many. I Cannot look much but your form suffers Some strange injury And seems to die: so vapours Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea. The muddy rumours. Of your burial move me To half-believe: your reappearence Proves rumours shallow, For the archaic trenched lines Of your grained face shed time in runnels: Ages beat like rains On the unbeaten channels Of the ocean. Such sage humour and Durance are whirlpools To make away with the ground Work of the earth and the sky's ridgepole. Waist down, you may wind One labyrinthine tangle To root deep among knuckles, shinbones, Skulls. Inscrutable, Below shoulders not once Seen by any man who kept his head, You defy questions You defy other godhood. I walk dry on you kingdom's border Exiled to no good. Your shelled bed I remember. Father, this thick air is murderous. I would breathe water.
