• IV •
The gathering of white birds grew: gulls
dressed in canvas from the sails of foundered ships
but stained by vapors from forbidden shores.
Alarm! Alarm! around refuse from a cargo boat.
They crowded in and formed an ensign-staff
that signaled “Booty here.”
And gulls careered across watery wastes
with blue acres gliding in the foam.
Athwart, a phosphorescent pathway to the sun.
But Väinämöinen travels in his past
on oceans glittering in ancient light.
He rides. The horse’s hooves are never wet.
Behind: the forest of his songs is green.
The oak whose leap’s a thousand years long.
The mighty windmill turned by birdsong.
And every tree a prisoner in its soughing.
With giant cones glinting in the moonlight
when the distant pine glows like a beacon.
Then the Other rises with his spell
and the arrow, seeing far and wide, flees,
the feather singing like a flight of birds.
A dead second when the horse abruptly
stiffens, breaks across the waterline
like a blue cloud beneath the thunder’s antenna.
And Väinämöinen plunges heavy in the sea
(a jumping-sheet the compass points hold tight).
Alarm! Alarm! among the gulls around his fall!
Like one bewitched, without anxiety,
standing at the center of the picture
of his joy, eleven corn sheaves bulging.
Reliance—an alp-top humming in the ether
three thousand meters up where the clouds sail
races. The puffed basking shark wallows
guffawing soundlessly beneath the sea.
(Death and renewal when the wave arrives.)
And peacefully the breezes cycle through the leaves.
On the horizon thunder rumbles dully
(as the herd of buffalo flees in its dust).
The shadow of a fist clenches in the tree
and strikes down him who stands bewitched
in his joyous picture where the evening sky
seems to glow behind the wild boar’s mask of clouds.
His double, envious, arranges
a secret rendezvous with his woman.
And the shadow gathers and becomes a tidal wave
a tidal wave with riding sea gulls darkened.
And the port-side heart sizzles in a breaker.
Death and renewal when the wave arrives.
The gathering of white birds grew: gulls
dressed in canvas from the sails of foundered ships
but stained by vapors from forbidden shores.
The herring gull: a harpoon with a velvet back.
In closeup like a snowed-in hull
with hidden pulses glittering in rhythm.
His flier’s nerves in balance. He soars.
Footless hanging in the wind he dreams
his hunter’s dream with his beak’s sharp shot.
He plunges to the surface, full-blossomed greed,
crams and jerks himself around his booty
as if he were a stocking. And then he rises like a spirit.
(Energies—their context is renewal,
more enigmatic than the eel’s migrations.
A tree, invisible, in bloom. And as
the grey seal in its underwater sleep
rises to the surface, takes a breath,
and dives—still asleep—to the seabed
so now the Sleeper in me secretly
has joined with that and has returned while I
stood staring fixedly at something else.)
And the diesel engine’s throbbing in the flock
past the dark skerry, a cleft of birds
where hunger blossomed with stretched maw.
At nightfall they could still be heard:
an abortive music like that from
the orchestra pit before the play begins.
But on his ancient sea Väinämöinen drifted
shaken in the squall’s mitt or supine
in the mirror-world of calms where the birds
were magnified. And from a stray seed, far
from land at the sea’s edge growing
out of waves, out of a fogbank it sprang:
a mighty tree with scaly trunk, and leaves
quite transparent and behind them
the filled white sails of distant suns
glided on in trance. And now the eagle rises.