Dressed in the ragged sailcloth of dead ships,
Flecked gray with the smokes of outlawed coasts,
The white flock swelled, the swarms of gulls cried out:
Alarm! Alarm! There’s something overboard.
They crowded tight to form a signal flag
That, fluttering, reads: Look sharp! There’s booty here!
So the gulls steered across the water-widths,
Blue pastures striding in the waves’ white foam,
A streak of phosphor straightway to the sun.
But Vainomoinen on his ancient journeys
Sparkles on sea swells in the ancient light,
His horse’s hooves so swift they’re hardly wet.
And back of him the green forest of his songs:
The oak tree poised to leap a thousand years,
A great mill turned by birdsong, and the wind
Imprisons each of the trees in its own roar.
Immense pinecones glimmer in the moonlight
When the sentinel pine ignites and flares.
It’s then the Other rises with his galdar;
The arrow springs from the bow; it sees with song
In the flash of its feathers like a flock of birds.
A dead second when the horse abruptly stiffens,
Then breaks above the gray-blue waterline
Like storm clouds under thunder’s quick antennae.
And Vainomoinen heaves in to the sea
(A firemen’s net the compass points unfurl).
Alarm! Alarm! Gulls swarming where he falls.
So too the man who stands without anxiety,
Bewitched at the center of his fortune’s wheel,
With his eleven grain-sheaves gold and bowing
And Trust’s alpine heights humming in the ether,
Three thousand meters up where the clouds are holding
A regatta. Sleek, well-fed, the shark wallows
In the waves, silent laughter and an open mouth
(Death and rebirth trade places in the breaking wave)
And the wind cycles peacefully through the leaves.
Drums then, on the horizon, a muffled thunder
(A buffalo herd racing from a prairie fire).
The tree’s shadow tightens into a fist
And the man at the center of his fortune’s wheel,
Bewitched there, is thrown down. The heavens glow
Behind the wild boar’s mask of an evening sky.
His doppelganger has grown envious
And made a secret bargain with his sister.
And the shadow, gathering fast, becomes a wave,
A wave in flood, dark, gulls riding aslant
The foam and the port-heart hissing in the crest.
Death and rebirth trade places in the breaking wave.
Dressed in the ragged sail-cloth of dead ships
Flecked gray with the signal fires of outlawed coasts
The white flock swelled, the swarm of gulls cried out.
The gray gull is a velvet-backed harpoon.
Up close, it looks like a snow-covered hull
With a pulse keeping time to a hidden beat.
Its flier’s nerves in balance, it lifts and wafts,
It dreams, footloose, hanging in the heavy wind,
Its hunter’s dream, its quick, sharpshooter’s beak
Plunges, ravenous, toward the surface of the sea
And wriggles around his prey like a gray sock
And tugs and jerks and lifts it like a spirit.
(Rebirth is power’s blind métier, a context
More mysterious than the eel’s migrations,
An invisible tree blossoming, and as the seal
In its fathoms-deep sleep rises gliding
Toward the ocean’s skin and takes a shuddering breath,
Then dives, still sleeping, to the bottom,
So now the Slumberer inside me has,
Secretly, returned, having joined itself to that
While I stood with my gaze fastened to something else.)
And the diesel engine throbbing in the swarm
Past the dark skerry, past the bird-infested cliffs
Where hunger’s blossoms are the gaping mouths.
You can still hear them as the dark comes on:
Undevelopedness’s music, the tentative sounds
The orchestra makes before the piece begins.
But still on his ancient ocean Vainomoinen
Drifted, shaken in the sea’s enormous pincers
Or sprawled in the calm’s still mirror where the birds
Are magnified. And from a waste seed, very far
From land, at the sea’s end, from the heave of waves,
From banks of shrouded sea fogs, it shot up:
An enormous tree with scaly bark and leaves
Utterly transparent, crystalline, and behind them
The billowing sails of distant suns glided
Forward in a trance. And an eagle lifts into the air.