1

Arthur, you wind-swept rider,
Clad in an opal chasuble of rain
While pirouetting in the turning alleys of the storm,
I have heard you at such hours
Calling aloud your tale in anguish,
Trying to make us hear somewhat beyond the thunder,
Trying to force upon us the real tale,
All with its real joys and faded sorrows.
In like manner the lightning of your fame
Cries out,
           "But he did hold fast,
And if mistaken what man on earth is not!
Remember that and Arthur lives today
Though he sleeps, though he is hard to hear."

Far down in routeless caves he lives.
Those antres, gaping up his voice,
Swallow it again in limey hunger,
Crunching it to ever fainter falls,
An echo's death, a tiny sleep of words -
A whistling out.
Then silence
And the heavy aeonic chuckling of old vaults and arches,
A final hum of nothing
And a sordine murmur.

Arthur, there are real tales to tell -- more than many.
Your words are needed -- speak them!
Only you can tell us who was Arthur
And what it was to have been king in Camelot,
Never really known, but not forgotten.

So let us bell the sky -- the both of us --
To tell of Arthur and an ample time
Big enough for deeds, and for this tale
Let lightning's hammer be the clapper.
Cancel the tinsel sounds of all todays
And their small tunes and penny whistles.
Then let the grave and sonorous ones --
The unmooned ones of many months and years,
Lop-headed giants with hunching shoulders
That lean like cracked colossi, sharp-edged
and painted in violet against the British sky -
Let them tell their iron story to us,
Let them give up their dreaming for the day
So we can catch their hoarse expostulations,
Their altercations, plaints, and laudings,
Like stone mill-wheels in a grinding.
To them listen! They were close to Arthur.

"There was none like Arthur.
None was ever known like Arthur.
Arthur lives!
A rare scintilla burning in the past
Once a short space and now no longer,
Apart from others, distant from all others,
Surely to himself a mystery, a spark
Whirling and spiring upward, unextinguished,
Floating in every hall where telling is,
Once come the minstrels, then out into the night."

Curious is the story, not sad, not glad --
Lies entangled and overspent conundrums --
A tale crouching, humping along back walkways
Like a crippled dog that seeks a home,
But part of it an under-hum of heroes,
Part a canticle that rises like the sun.

Artorius!
Hic jacet rex quondam,
Rexque futurus!
And where does he lie, this king?
And under what stone is his hearing still awake,
And his seeing, within what hill?
Time once was, a mystery play presented
This man's birth and life and passing,
A long, melodius, and Thespian shout.
It faded and it asks to be repeated.
For time is poorer with any man forgotten.

Once there were three men, Vortigern,
Ambrosius, and Arthur. They were men
Who knew each other in the British evening,
They were heralds of its chill and winter.
All died in Rome's last service, coarse men,
But only the latter's muffled pulse is heard.
Necklaces of words of him shall dangle
On every century's bosom, the other two
Forgot.

2

Once Merlin, angered, said of Arthur,
"This king shall cast no shadow, and no man
Shall find his grave. He did not listen
To the iong call and the lark-song of Celtic blood."

And Illtud, an old man long after, remembered
Those words of Merlin and dropped them in his palm
And studied them, as the sightless study voices.
Illtud with years would squint into the past
And ponder wonders in a green recall.

And he would say,
"Backward looking I see my cousin Arthur,
His life was full of deeds and all were Roman.
He felt a richness in Rome's ways, acknowledged,
Lauded power. He rejoiced in the countryside,
The viridian and shining Celtic mother, Britain,
But only as she nurtured Rome's sons and daughters.

"The stars and the fates made him their orphan.
One of the two worlds would claim him,
Yet not the sibylline one he looked to.
I remember him between two thrones, two times,
Not blest by either nor yet turned away,
Two spirits jointly. Yet his record reads awry
Like a tale told idly and in an alien tongue.
Sad were his sometime hours, and he lonely --
But so with most men. It is true
His captains crumpled, his greatest died about him
And took away his honor and left his name
Unforgettable and ruined both.
The noble pavement he had walked upon
Was broken by his steps and brushed aside
In piles of tesserae.

"I rode with Arthur, ate and slept with him,
But I too, for Christ and Mary, left him.
I do not know what barrow he lives within
Or under what crude cross he fits his bones.
Merlin said he died not -- of course he died,
For Christ lets no man live on earth forever,
And the Celtic gods are false and full of lies.
I can hope that in the jumble of those days
A sweet forgiveness touched and woke him
As heavenly Mary carried him away.
Victorious he and gracious as few before him,
Measured in his victories, a king apart.
But what he gained, an hour lived -- no more.
What has he left that we today can see.

"In some ways still he sits among us,
If only to listen to us as in the past.
Perhaps he casts no shadow, but his presence stirs.
And even the sheep tremble on the downs
When the vault of heaven swallows up a cloud
Like Arthur, and then thunders come".

3

A stone was centered in the heart of Arthur,
Abraided, splintered, a massive cobblestone
Pushed by tides of passion here and there,
Horribly deep in the ocean of his soul;
Immersed in those cetacean and chill waters
It loomed through curtains of the weedy deeps
Where turn and twist the krakens huge with wrath.

"His dreams were troubled. His sister's face
Floated in the smother of his dreams, while she
Threw kisses to him out of sulphured clouds
That rolled incontinent between the two -
Gasping and sighing they in loves untasted.
This way it had been
For much of Arthur's life -- by night, demons,
Jerking and monstrous puppets tumbling about,
Spilling from every cranny of his heart,
Assailing, shouting through locked jaws, pointless,
Undone with terror. Repose came not often
to Arthur; he welcomed day.

          Such his nights.

By day the trumpet and the ripple of distant hooves
Steadied his heart, their rhythms understood,
As when the gods of battle sweated frenzy
and flung about them sheets of dust, bellowing
at other gods of many-minded murder --
Better than night was this to Arthur.

Staid was Arthur and his tokens harsh.
Still he could laugh and sometimes sleep,
So few the friends who guessed him inwardly.

One could.
One knew who Arthur was -- one knew.

The daughter of Ygerna, Morgen, knew.
Arthur's sister walked in a morning's light;
Lily-like she swayed and hearts melted
As, all about, she gazed this way and that
And played with glossy braids of hair, aware
Not of others but only of her brother Arthur -
Fierce and quiet he to her, a gliding man
With full intent of peace, and seldom foiled.

Until Morgen tripped him -- or he her -
The first day of May's sweetness by the ford
Where one can wade the Cam and where she washed.
And not again to them appeared the world
And life and time the same, but new made,
An intense, a holy fire in which burned
Daily and every second their hearts' hurt.
Furious their pain, smouldering in discretion,
Taught by their iron wills and tutored by
The terror of their love.
          Merlin discovered them
And crafted a way to turn aside love's power
In Arthur's heart. With Morgen he had no way.

So found its end -- an end without a term --
The rainbow sweetness of their summer's time.
It seemed that he forgot, as hungering
A man can think no other thing than feast;
So Arthur, unaware, still hungered
But lost himself, a living man, in sleep.
A legacy he left her, a testament
Unsigned, its waxy seal blood's color,
It's script tangled and hinting at love's pain.
Morgen thenceforth lived in Glaston's close
And never forgot her brother Arthur. As day
Is not lost within the night but comes again,
So Arthur leaned into her life of every day,
A present season in her every year,
And was forgotten not.
          As for him
He rode away to serve Ambrosius,
The brother of his father, of Britons king.
Thus apprenticed to the Roman dream,
Rebuilding walls and towers against the Saxon,
Zealous and never tiring, climbed Arthur
Into the light of iridescent fame.
Here was the man who could be emperor
Loved by Britons all and made a giant
By their love. Ambrosius left for Arthur
A last chance to cull the Roman rose
From its bed of Saxon weeds, to prune the rank,
Green thicket that threatened gardener
and garden both -- a grim last chance indeed.

A first thing, he raised up Camelot,
Rimmed it round with heavy timbered walls
Stepped back in series, gave it a narrow gate
and just within that portal placed a shrine
To Stephen, with a bell without to mourn
In the pagan air and summon men to Christ.

Then Arthur brought to Camelot a mistress.
For queen he took the precious Guinevere,
Vortigern's reluctant daughter, pale
With golden hair. The lady seldom spoke;
She looked into the distance as if she sought
For that which lay beyond her husband Arthur,
But, too passive far, stretched out no hand
To grasp it, sat still and upright always
As if inhabiting a spectral world --
A lovely captive of what did not exist.
And round his queen Arthur placed his captains,
And they were in awe of her, as of a mother
Whose smile had frozen and had become a stone.

So one could rest, sleep safe in Camelot,
An eyrie from which the sentinel's hooded eyes
Could sweep into Britannia and mark the dip
And toss of every bush, the pitch of boats
At sea, the treason in a traveler's tread
Spying along Roman roads and denser ways,
Chalk lands and the moors where once had tramped
In clock-like and slowed lockstep legions,
Sturdy under great weights, stolid,
Roman.