Upon the shores bathed by withdrawing breakers,
four sailors lay against the wooden beam
that anchored them above the raging stream
while their ship drowned, sieved by the whirling shakers.
The stranded crew is made up of a man
a lynx, a woman and a mandarin duck,
who after the due rest and rant against their luck,
their doom of sand scorched by the sun they scan,
wave after dreary wave of drought till they locate
the silver heaving of the spaceship’ dome,
announcing through their doom the hope for home.
With varied strides to pace their weary gait,
they reach the entrance of the ship to see
that someone must have broken in. Afraid
that something might be lurking in the shade,
they chose the lynx, well skilled in bravery,
to go in first and check if all is safe.
And that she does, with a surprising rage,
impressed on violent grawlings that assuage
the vibrant stillness straining their minds’ chafe,
to which the ship responds with languid wails
resounding through its plated entrails, o’er
the lynx’s strolls in and out of the core
to swear that nothing was worth her travails;
but the duck ducks the echoes of the bolted shell
to run back to the sea, convinced that there,
abandoned to the rumbling surf, no scare
would raffle her bright feathers like the well
that magnifies a thud to sizeless screams.
The man immediately darts to her chase,
the while the woman contacts the main base
from the ship screen, that in an instant streams
the head of the laboratory for
soil studies, who looks eager to communicate
the status of their quest:’ the last update
is worse than any I have seen before:
conditions for a landing on the moon
deteriorated in the past few hours,
with the inclemency of constant showers
that threaten to be turned into snow soon;
and even if you managed it, the soil
is so much soaked that you would just extract
the tubes of plastic by the sewage tract
to substitute them with rolls of tin foil,
and then watch movies with the station’s chief—
in case you cannot sleep, as he for sure
will be awake, having forgotten the allure
of the dawn’s lighting shafts on the night’s grief.’
The man appears reflected on the screen,
as he’s returned from the shore with the duck
firm in his arms —and bags of plastic stuck
around their heads like turbans—, and his spleen,
provoked by the report he’s overheard,
he shares thus with the crew:’ Then it is best
that we abort the mission. Our friends rest
below the shrining waves, as we’ve incurred
in those uprooted rocks that smashed our ship,
our Argo, like the foamy crests that burst
against the scraping reef unyielding to their thrust,
and we don’t need to let more losses strip
us of the tribute we owe to their memories
for telling us, by their demise, that human stories
serve always to partake in ends and glories
that are not human’s, rendering our pleas
a puff that hoists the powers sailing to
a pleasure unrestrained by ours.’ Thus said
the man, defending reason when instead
his fears would fain avoid the chilling view
of the sidereal trance surrounding him–
with nothing to be touched but the cold hand
of death, where the blood clogs in the veins fanned
by gestures that can’t from procedures skim
the comforting experiences exceeding
established policies. His heedful crew
at last agrees to bid the ship adieu,
and, tarrying to adjust each strut to speeding,
they all move inland, crossing a tall slope
of tussock grass that leads down to a pub
where other members of their science hub
are waiting to discuss the mission’s future hope.
And as a series of successive places
along a journey opens their significance
by the unravelling of their reiterance,
forbidden in each scene, so these new faces
insist that they are certainly more capable
than those forgotten ere their rescue came;
but the survivors th’others’ bombast blame,
for daring measure the immovable
plan of necessity, which summons herds
to trench the fields that canvass her naive
disdain for anything definitive
professed by people’s prophesying words.
New volunteers insist on helping, yet
the man is adamant in his decision
to forfeit–not even a girl that sparks his vision
with winks inducing his despite to bet
on the inevitable innuendo
of their two bodies huddled up to heat
the sheets pitched on their background’s sterile treat,
could well persuade him to lead the commando.
A tall man storms into the pub, with badges
that cover the full length of his white cape,
announcing him, with glitters in his wake agape,
the sole authority to soothe all grudges;
he drafts at once five new explorers, and
to the man says: ‘Since you are so resolved
to be discharged, I will have you absolved
if…’ An abrupt wind burst in from the strand,
irrupting in the pub to sift all talks with whirls
as swift as thoughts are to the gods, which wrest
the man far from the captain’s last request,
and sentence him to suffer many hurls
until the currents lower him aghast
next to the entrance of a gothic castle.
There by the iron gate, armed with a pestle,
a giant stands, insurmountable and vast,
with thick red skin resembling molten stones;
by his side loiters his small sister, wearing
a candid ermine fur trailed by her feet, while bearing
a smile as sweet as scary are her brother’s groans.
The man attempts to wrestle with the giant,
but his arms are too short to gird the other’s waist,
and he is thrown into a ditch with haste,
while thronging laughs throne in his ear from the defiant
foe, as, apart, the sister trots and bobs
over the brother’s shoulders, with her smile
by apprehension shrinking all the while.
But in the ditch where the man’s lying, throbs
a rill whose ripples lull a nymph to sleep,
who has, by the male limbs entangled in
her flowing weeds, been woken up; her chin
first pricks the locks that the man’s kickings steep,
then her full figure springs, clothed by the waters still,
with just a golden leaf to mask her face,
as she was once foretold by the embrace
of the enamoured stream that gave her fill
from which she cowered fearing the loud sea,
that she would finally resume her rushing
when the man helplessly trapped in her brushing
had been untangled from the faith he cannot flee.
The giant, seeing such a golden glow
resplending on the nymph’s attire of spray,
is quenched of all the hunger that might sway
his clear reflection on the minted mask to go,
allowing for the man to climb the slope
and leave the ditch. Far from the castle’s gate
he runs, and more he’d have run to placate
the fear of ambushed ills in the horizon’s scope,
had not the tall man suddenly appeared
on the declining path from a hill’s top,
who, with imperious words, bids him to stop:
‘Wherefore are you here? Why have you veered
so far from where I set you to fulfil
your final quest?’ To which the man replies
that the wind swooped before he could surmise
the end of his assignment; th’other’s shrill
brief is: “it’s the last gem of the lost pendant
of Conall Cernach”. Sluggishly the man’s
steps turn to where the castle’s entrance scans
his doubts; when, halfway through his stroll, the pleasant
monotony of weeds-brushed ebbing strings
the melody of scents on meadowed alps embossed,
tell him that he’d been, for a long while, lost;
yet close to him sharp stones, in nested rings,
around a ruined house seem to have sprouted
and girt their core on the intact bricked womb
of an old hearth. He rests not, for a gloom
arises through the slopes from the taunts shouted
by the crew members rushing to perfect
his task, which to avoid, he pushes through
the mantel’s gaping mouth that soon starts to
spin on itself to grant him a direct
admittance to the castle by teleportation,
thus safely warping him beyond the side
of the gate guarded by the giant. Wide,
in front of him, the furrowed decoration,
that streaks a cloven valley with the breasts
of stonewall terraces compiled to rise
the wafts of cherry trees in blushing sighs
bestowing their pied blooms to the wind’s crests,
unravels its meanders to the sky.
But soon are heard the comrades in pursuit,
as through the teleport they’ve followed suit,
that threaten to engulf him in their cry:
the man now, mounting on his fury, gleans,
from the embedded sprinkles in the glare,
a cloud that springs him up unto the air,
with gusts of mantling puffs charged by the sheens
of the girl winking trailing in his storm,
for whose withdrawal he who from the whirled winds surges
into a spark that by its trickling scourges
a thunder skirting his blown droplets swarm,
resounding swiftly in a lightning shake
that stops the girl from soaring after him.
Releasing then the coils of his wroth whim,
he sets down to the ground, but in the wake
of his spent rage, a voice from far chimes in:
‘You fool: albeit I cannot reach you, I
will dawn on you with visions that belie
your wits; with madness will your death begin!’
Around the man, the branches of the trees
lose all their leaves at once, accompanied
by shrieks that from the petioles proceed,
which show, at close inspection, the pale frieze
of peeping elves lodged in a conch-like hood;
and where once grew the blowing blooms, now dangle
the heads of baby dolls caught in a tangle
of their unscrewed eyes seeping rotten wood.
He rumbles down the terraced orchard while
attempting to escape the vision, but,
once he has reached the valley’s bottom rut,
he finds his shoes are gone, right where an aisle,
decked by festoons of plastic flowers, spreads
its pillars for his welcome. Other people there
are prostrate by a shrine, with just the bare
arch of their shoulders offered to his reads;
they are impassively in wait (as if
their expectations had been so frustrated
that they know any miracle is fated
to usher in more to beg for, but stiff
endurance grants their longings the support
by which they care to love each other merely
in waiting) yet the women’s dresses dearly
expand the man’s imaginary sport,
spurred by the radiance of the skins he dreams
resounding in the throbs of the reliefs
the bulged clothes chime, borne by the pearly reefs
brushed by the buoyancy of swelled extremes,
to blossom in the light of sprouting spumes
that from the thrusting of thirst vessels stems
to cup with blessings the heaves of cragged hems;
but at the end his visionary plumes
are curbed by recollecting that he’s lost
his shoes, without which he’s at a loss to deem
himself fit to walk tall while asking to redeem
his pleasures through somebody else’s. Crossed
with his ill luck, on his four legs he kneels,
and sheltering his body in the sprawling
of his own shadow on the floor, he’s crawling
among the people’s feet, until his heels
spin past the altar, where a mule track by a stream
leads his steps to a monastery. Wrapped
in the last vapours that his rancour lapped,
he’s flown inside the vault where on a beam
he seats, in time to hear one monk below
praise the puissance of words, which by impressing
their spur on airy nothing, the oppressing
strains on the senses they puff on a glow
that solid truths confound in their pied veil.
The man, hurled by the brewing fumes he’s seeping,
lands by the monk to vent his mood while weeping:
‘That’s nonsense: with each word I speak, I fail
to capture the illusion of a joy
that seemed to tend its coils to nurse my thrust,
as with these bubbling throes all hopes combust
in croaking flames that memories destroy;
and while I try their freedom to compose
in sense or reason, rhyme or metric, more
of their blown graces mirrored by their humming ore
eludes the shards that my reflections pose,
to pall a beauty whose light is not kindled
by wreaths I breathe.’ The monk replies with just
a smile that frees the man of his distrust,
and shows him to a breakfast room, where mingled
among the monks, the man sits at a table’s pew,
to join the hymns that praise the toils repaid
by bread and jam in front of him arrayed.
After the chiming chants have charmed anew
the hush, the man inquires the weather from
a window that lets in a dimming light
announcing the advance of rain that might
turn soon to snow. ‘Don’t think about the glum’
a monk tells him, ‘it’s good for mushrooms: e’en
when you’re not sure if is it from too much
death coated on your tendons that the clutch
of passive drips through flows its suck can’t wean,
or is it that there’s not enough in you
of death to pump up living, think then how
the mushrooms burnish life’s own rotting brow
by grafting bones with scything roots that brew
a pageantry of trees on the excesses
that they exhume by swelling the dew musk
on dormant exhalations that they husk;
thus think that both your failures and successes
draw on an arabesque that broiders threads
beyond the ending and beginning of your aims–
which care, indifferent to yours, inflames
a contemplation orbiting our counted beads.’
The man is comforted by the monk’s speech,
and now perceives that by the table there’s
a tripod made of stone, which trebled gears
enclose an ancient flute within his reach;
he at once knows that the lost gem he seeks
is in the flute, and its shine would be honed
from the dull pedestal if he intoned
the proper blows along the holes he tweaks.
But he’s appeased by being sure that he
is not yet ready to attempt the feat,
and maybe, – he gloats constellating his retreat
with musing– he must never be.

– Anonhimoose