The Horse-Man

We do not find the Island
of the Everliving in our voyage.
We travel so far across the page
and then turn home, released
at last by a sign sufficient
enough in guise and gesture
that whispers Not Here enough.
In the Voyage of St. Brendan
it was a magnificently dressed and
dignified horseman who rode
up to their boat on the next
blandly crashing shore: a prince
who had left his country long
ago to guard the margins.
Or perhaps he was a totem
further down -- Manannan
self-exiled from Christian Eire
who wards those far lands
where wilds remain hoar-wooly.
Or perhaps he goes farthest
down, past the salt king to
those fathers who brow
the keep of abysms. To
see him was enough;
He didn’t say a word
but Brendan knew
and turned his mission
round, bidding his men
to oar them home
where white pages waited
to receive his water tale.
The rider offered no news
of what haloed behind him
ultriolet and sere:
we aren’t told that inland that
shore was the Terra
Repromissionis Sancotorum
of the saints, nor the
Otherworld that laps
its footers. All we get
is the tale of searching for
that place everywhere water
sings its shire, vowels keeled
in boats which are themselves
the tropes of an undying
emerald gleam, isle for isle
finding Him in wild and wilder
panoplies of arch feathers
and furred seem. A tale
is not for dying but
the hallow harrowing
which makes dying
worth it in the end:
augments of life which
are the true chest of
treasure at the bottom
of the sea, a heart
completed in all it repleted
in gorgeous proximities
on salt extremities,
the warp and woof of
that rider’s look from
helm to saddle to hoof.
Take the full measure of
him here, fellow raveller,
on this dank humid dark
Thursday in the belly of July
with a frayed day breathing
heavy on the windows of
the east and this pen
scuffed and battered
and barnacled from all
the shores it gleaned
egressing cross the page.
I found him in a tale
buried in a book
three times three
centuries old, itself
a remnant of a song
that had almost fully
died and dived from the minds
of of that time. There he is
right here, eyes bluer than
polar seas, hair heavy as
a mane, proud and ancient
on a grey mare that sweeps
the wildest wave: The herald
who is the shore no man
can reach oaring beach to beach,
the summa and quintessence
who bounds the known world
to its dark other, like the spine
of Brendan’s finished book.
The end of the tale which will
never quite complete but
simply trails off here, like
moonlight across night waters,
like the sound of a crashing surf
forever lost and always near.