She walks on sand-white sand
The beach at Anse-Vata,
She deserves the most beautiful thing
She’s ever seen
You know that
And you as if she opened up a word
Know what it cupped could name it,
As if she opened up a hand
And what it held
Then framed it
The shore of the lagoon
The dark-blue setting of a diamond ocean,
Cut on a blade of surf
In a sharp fold
Below its absolute horizon
See not a dark sail on it
And no old blood,
Nothing in the sunset
Wounds the sudden curve
Of night
But a thread below
Follows the division,
Spun together out of silver
Of what you only sense
And the essential
Found in darkness by feel
In silence by touch,
A lesson without elements
Of force or power
With neither master nor mistress
Then all the days all the hours
Open up their jewel cases,
And in the fractions
Of a regard
The difference is made.
…
One morning bullets are fired
In the image of a language,
From the clearing
(I have the heart
Of a murderer
Whose ill-gotten gains
You know too),
That when the writing is complete
Will hold within it
All it cannot reach
A sloping down at night
Foreshortening the bay at Anse-Vata,
From such a language
That kills by which
It keeps alive.
…
And one morning we hear news
From a hotel balcony,
The Minotaur cries out
At the limit
Of his humanity
In the bestial language
Of his Ariadne,
She has strangled the labyrinth
With the music
Of a single cord.
