Galahad

The third and final stage in the development
of the Quest motif is dominated by Galahad
(Galaad), renowned for his unparalleled
purity and excellence ... As the son of
Launcelot he is perfect; he has never failed,
nor does he in his quest for the Holy Grail.
In most versions he reaches the castle,
achieves the Grail, and then just disappears.
He fulfills his destiny and then leaves
this world in an ethereal blaze of glory.

-- “The Fisher King,”
www.uidaho.edu/student_orgs/arthurian_legend/grail/fisher/


I.

When Arthur’s court sat to meat
on the eve of Pentecost
there was a clap of thunder
which pealed in pearly light
across the faces of the startled
knights. A door opened and He
walked in, the brightest knight
of all, the end of every quest
to bleed from dripping quills.
He found that chair inside the Round
which none had tried before
without a siege of horrors;
and sat sedately down. You’d
think he’d drawn Excalibur
from stone the way the court
gasped and stared at him,
sitting there as easy as you please,
with those blue eyes so icy bright
and fey and bottomless. All were
amazed to see the fate and character
Camelot meet in words of him
athrone that evil chair.
The youth sat silent (almost as if
in dream) as the old man who led
him in told the Round of the youth’s
lineage back through Launcelot
and thence down a dizzy stair,
each father like a floor or door
each sire darker and older than
the last--Merlin back to Taleissin
to their totem shaman to his
stag-head god, Manuin down
through his tidal rhythmus back
to every father’s shore; down
into the titan sea of Lir
blackening league to league to Mer
-- A host of dragon-rouges
no sword of men could best
nor woman’s thighs desist.
And thus the greatest quest
imagined by that court was
bequeathed to him,
the fairest son of all, who
wreathed a blueblack ardor
behind a samite, bloodless brow.

II.

They bid him stay; but the news
of Grail had roused the rose
bed in his heart in a riot of
sweet bloom. He ran from every
room. All Camelot grieved to watch
him mount his great white
horse and thunder off, disappearing
like a setting sun into the
forest dark just beyond.
After four days’ ride he
crossed a white chapel where
a hermit bid him stay, producing
from behind an altar a
great white shield which
had waited millennia for him.
As he rode on that shield
blared like an enmooned sun
in the dark, shielding all it
shadowed in his lap.
On the shield’s centre was a bright
red cross, the wet cry of
every savior doused in fire’s
white thunder. Blood’s shield
it was, carotid and infernal,
mixing every pure and pagan
pulse in its round. In the
Grail lore there’s always
the blend of imp and angel,
the one both sire and dark
lover of the next. Thus Uther
yielded Arthur; and Niniane
vexed Merlin into horns of
stone; thus Launcelot
founded Galahad in his
betrayal of his lord with
Guenievere, his sword
drenched in that mere
which fed the uterus which
delved Christ to Calvary.
Each alternation -- angel
wing then devil’s cock --
spins the carriage wheels which
ferries dead lords across
the sea to rest at last on
that crystal bier at the
bottom of Grail’s dark
golden well. Every previous
tale sped Galahad on his way.
And where all the other knights
somehow always lost their way
in tangled brakes of pride
and lust, He (or whoever
wrote of him at last) rode
straight on through to
its jeweled square, there
at a clearing in the center
of the woods next to a loch
too deep to harrow with a name.
The portcullis raised for him as
it does only once in three
hundred songs; he crossed the
evil moat, whispering Uffington
to calm his nervous mount.
As his blue eyes pierced the
gloom ahead, the aura of his shield
startled and fanned out to pyre
he and his horse in a moony sear
of post-Pentacostal light.
Inside the realm he rode, dismounted,
and walked on, earth’s light to
heaven’s dark: A found the chancel deep
within where a maiden waited holding
the gold vessel in her hands. Galahad
grasped it with Grail in both hands,
lifting it to our lips at last,
flooding the world in wild red light,
pouring down a perilous sweetness
like a first and last enduring kiss.

III.

That story now replete in mine,
I stir in my white writing chair,
aware now of first light warming
in the windows. Our cat sits in one
scenting the garden’s news while
a red pickup truck hurries
up the avenue, a Red Knight
roaring out to fray the same
old same old day. I’m emerging
from an ever-noctal wood with
my words still dripping with its brine,
my hair like seaweed scattered
on a shore, my eyes refocusing
at last. I’m writing my way home
upon the tide called Galahad
so many years ago,
a brilliant artery far beneath
the foam-backed lines of ink I write
in swank similitude of a
blacker, darker, deeply more sexual
verse. I’m questing in the way which
grails by widdershins,
completing every ache of old
with backward whets against
a black stone fished from
deeps offshore the Iona
I have only dreamed.
He is now the old man
who leads the way into
your rounded room, proffering
to me the seat prepared for
us that night when Uther
spermed his enemy’s boudoir,
spiralling hot dragons in the soak
of Arthur’s storied womb.
My Grail was cast in that infernal
cry: I pour it here and freely
on the day’s soft infant thighs,
a rosy dark peculiar juice
arousing every word I cry.