Arcadia Revisited

Although you're older and a touch myopic,
on coming here you thought to find a clutch
of naiads in a brook with beaded spines
stretched at a sun in slow-fall, rumps pushed up
like Valentine hearts, pulled under foam fringes;
or Silenus, woozy in his canted world, spilling
his tankard, hedged by melon-faced tipplers
whose jaws hang slack in permanent guffaw:
bacchants, bare-assed voluptuaries, cupids,
attending his collapse, air thrumming with a tense
blush of birdsong: the port-red flutter of flutes,
the shrill, cinnamon-sharp chirrups of piccolos.

And then the blare of a horn: a shepherd's flock
galumphing up some sunblazed slope, leaving
a green valley echoing. But the day winds out,
dusk settles in cool silvers. The furtive sun,
once salient as a crown, glints like a drowner's hand
between armadas of cloud that drape the hilltops.
Crocus blooms bow down; in a wizened ilex
one pipit cries. You imagine this world is spent:
waters soiled with the deepening silt of age,
windfall foaming, cracked like a crone's skin.

You kneel at a spring and spot beneath the surface
a face you've seen before, drawn and fish-eyed
from mooning into a well of enchantments too bright,
too cloyed with opulent greens and golds to mean
as much to the father as to the dreaming fry
in his fiery dawn. You see in that searching gaze
the reason for your visit. You thought you came
to sing the brown pools back to clarity,
to make the olives thicken with oil, to hear

the splash of galleons in the salt-laced air
arriving somewhere in the middle distance:
a coast obscured by coppice or chaparral,
just over the bluff. But now you see you came
to greet the eyes that quiver and requite
the soft, dumb love that furrows your brow,
the peace that likes things quiet and hears no feet
in the grass. You lean and taste your life.
Your tongue is steeped in ordinary water.