Map of the New World

[I] ARCHIPELAGOES

At the end of this sentence, rain will begin.
At the rain's edge, a sail.

Slowly the sail will lose sight of islands;
into a mist will go the belief in harbors
of an entire race.

The ten-years war is finished.
Helen's hair, a gray cloud.
Troy, a white ashpit
by the drizzling sea.

The drizzle tightens like the strings of a harp.
A man with clouded eyes picks up the rain
and plucks the first line of the Odyssey.

[II] THE COVE

Resound it, surge: the legend of Yseult
in languorous detonations of your surf.
I've smuggled in this bleached prow, rustling shoreward
to white sand guarded by fierce manchineel,
a secret
read by the shadow of a frigate hawk.

This inlet's a furnace.
The leaves flash silver signals to the waves.
Far from the curse of government by race,
I turn these leaves—this book's seditious fault—
to feel her skeins of sea mist cross my face,
and catch, on the wind's mouth, a taste of salt.

[III] SEA CRANES

"Only in a world where there are cranes and horses,"
wrote Robert Graves, "can poetry survive."
Or adept goats on crags. Epic
follows the plough, metre the ring of the anvil;
prophecy divines the figurations of storks, and awe
the arc of the stallion's neck.

The flame has left the charred wick of the cypress;
the light will catch these islands in their turn.

Magnificent frigates inaugurate the dusk
that flashes through the whisking tails of horses,
the stony fields they graze.
From the hammered anvil of the promontory
the spray settles in stars.

Generous ocean, turn the wanderer
from his salt sheets, the prodigal
drawn to the deep troughs of the swine-black porpoise.

Wrench his heart's wheel and set his forehead here.