GLAUCUS

Inward your black globe crumbles wearily.
Lean inward past the sinew of the heart.
Far underneath red springs of breathing see
the sober fabrication break apart.

And you have laid aside your yellow hair;
models of motion that were hands are gone,
and the free arms and surfaces that wear
tints like a change are dropping, one by one.

Stand in the white square of the centre, shed
leaf after leaf the dwellers in your mind
steered backward whence the green cutwater spread
two ruins wincing down the way behind.

A debris of bright accidents is laid
about your feet, and in the mediate space
circles your form naked as it was made
and turned toward its own symbol face to face.

He stands: the prints of shells are on his beard,
the grave arms tasseling green weed that drips
the ooze salt to his feet; the hands are smeared
with pulp; the gray scurf stiffens on his lips.

Yet for your presence light begins to glow
red like a lamp for Mary, and the stone
is shriven of excrescence. Slow and slow
the fragments drop; the figure stands alone.

Lattimore

GLAUCUS

2

The ocean kept him where Atlantis near
rippled its towers of stone along the gloom
of water falling quiet. He is here.

The sea drains moaning from this shuttered room,
the shells and weeds upon the noise, to leave
the stone as live as when the quarry broke
unbosoming his contour. Do not grieve.

Wreckage was littered in your eyes. You woke
to meet your lover rising from the sea
on the green stairway to the sun winding
between your shadow and your heart. Let be.

Distance has died between and you are one.