16

Finally they came to Camlann, those hapless few
Watching the river dumbly as it flushed
Its waters into the reedy swamp of Glaston,
Impounding the great gaunt island Tor.
Gawain had died already, his bones crushed
By a Saxon club as the gates of Camelot
Opened to the last sortie. He fell
Under the rush off horses and rolled aside
And shook until death sat down beside him.
Such was not known to Arthur until
The count of men at the first halt of the day.
Gareth looking back had seen the deed.
And telling Arthur he looked away and sighed.

The noon halt lasted while Arthur wept.

Long and hot was that day of slow retreat,
Wheeling into the sun and under trees;
Wide was the havoc. Bors led all the rest
In valor and carefulness, and he expunged
Ali traces from the past of faithlessness.
He was taken when his sword arm fell
Pinned to his body with a Saxon lance.
Gaheris the left-handed linked arms with Kay,
Their horses lost and lances -- their shields were all.
And for an hour in the sun they stood
In fine array and only at the last
Like broken swords they clattered to the ground,
Their arms linked still. Gaheris died
Without a cry. Kay crawled and bayed in rage
As the cautious circle of the Saxons closed
To smother them with blows.

          High on a horse
Sat Mordred, bloodied himself but dauntless
Goading the battle on, a son in search of a father,
"Slay Arthur!" screaming, "And let me see his head."

And what of Arthur who, on that day of blood
By Camlann's ford was closing a life's circle,
A spectral being lumbering through the dust!
His last day saw a lion wounded
And a spotted panther glaring in the heat,
A king of men unthroned and limping off --
And the grating rumble of a life descendent.

Bedivere was by him as the dark came on
Flooding away the horrors of that day,
Also Lucan, the captain still in youth,
Red bearded, his cheek and thigh slashed open.
By Cam's water, beneath the canopy,
The windless tent of stars, these three rested,
Lucan and Arthur dying.

Under a thorn bush flowering Arthur lay
And ever and while he swept aside
The impatient blossoms blowing near his head
As if in weariness a diadem rejecting,
While in the distance rippling came the sound
Of wavelets that moved the sedge upon the shore
Speaking of marsh and plopping frogs and night.

Lucan the youth, the very young now lay
Not stirring and without speech, an eerieness
Sculptured like a tall tree fallen down.

And Bedivere,
"Arthur, king, now is Lucan dead.
Let us weep for him a moment. Not much time
Is left for tears. And if you will it, come
Lean on me for the marsh is near, the Tor
Beyond, and the healing halls not far."

"Friend Bedivere, from my roster you remain
Apostle to a later age and men
Unborn as yet. Take now this Caliburn,
The sword that Merlin gave me once
Much promising. Gone is its fire.
To me it was a curse. I wish that none
May follow me and take the sword again
To hew against the pyramid of time
And find beyond a nothing, a vast inane.
Take now the sword and standing at the marsh
Hurl it up among the stars and, far away,
Like distant lightning mark its path.
Then tell me and I will know."

And Bedivere from Arthur slipped the belt
And the heavy scabbard and Caliburn the sword,
Rose and left the refuge and did the deed,
Reluctant to the end. The waters warped
And the waves grew weak, dark they grew and wan.
And the deathliness of that hour came upon them.
"Now," said Arthur, "Now I am king no more;
My life has changed. Now I will go to Glaston
Where is my heart."

So through the night there trailed two forms
Falling and stumbling, awakening the sudden owls
Who slid away with whispering wings and hooting,
To whom would hear, of Bedivere and Arthur.

17

A strange tale was told by Bedivere
As he sat with Illtud, eight years beyond that time,
Among rich abbey vines that verdure poured,
Cascades of plenty, over the ashlar walls.
Leaning back against the wall the two,
Bedivere crumbling a loaf with hands
Still elegant as he were yet in Camelot,
And swart, with sunken eyes that still with wit
At times could sparkle. No more the warrior,
Late times had cast him as a Severn boatman
Ferrying the world from shore to shore,
His golden hair all lank and doused with spray.
On the isle of Pyr this meeting of the two
Arranged for them by the Irish god of winds.

"No fat abbot I," said Illtud laughing
And pointing to the flocking crows in flight,
"They eat as well as we do here, and even
Better, for we sometimes share with them --
They never share with us.

          So far away
Seems Camelot to me and all the feasting!
Here I have some huts of stone, a barn
To store our barley, and the abbey church --
So plain, so small, but good enough for prayer.
But not the least I have a house of books
Where, after prayers, I see the monks instructed
In psalms and singing, in the work of Christ.
There is enshrined the golden Word and holy.
We mix the mournful rollers and our singing
In concert with the cross-grained winds, or else
In loud antiphonies we both do make,
Both man and nature, a fraternal praise.
Thus do we surround the holy Word
With love enchanted like the song of a blossom or a bird.
But I have not forgotten Camelot.
And never will I cease to think of Arthur."

He paused to look away across the headland,
To the blues contrasting of heaven and lordly ocean.
"Now years ago the rumor came to us
Of Camelot in ruins and Arthur dead.
I have prayed for Arthur often -- what do you bring,
Good Bedivere, of knowing of his end,
For you were with him at the Camlann ford.
He was last seen there they said -- and say"

And Bedivere,
"You ask me now to tap a sorrow deep,
As deep and bottomless as is the ocean,
Full of the jumbled miscellanea
Of battle and the coughing up of blood.
For that and other reasons I do not
Remember Camlann well, and after Kay
Had died then did I remember less than that.
But this I recall, we remnant fled away,
We three. And then when Lucan died I stood
with Arthur sick then with death's illness,
And we of all were only two -- just two,
Twins at the last born blind in war.
And then I heard Arthur's whisper in the night,
'Now I will go to Glaston, only a league
From here -- across the marsh and near the Tor --
There is something there for me. Give me your hand,
Good Bedivere, and lead me to the marsh.'

All in the cruel dark we went until
The glissant moon came out and silent we
Stood by the water armored in its light
To look across the sedge.
          And so she came,
The lovely Morgen, more beautiful than the stars.
A small craft and she poling it
Glided through the sedge that swallowed up
Even the tiny ripples that she made
As they scraped against the gunwales with the sound
Of gently urgent swishing -- nothing else.
Even the bullfrogs left to her the silence,
And the moon acknowledged her the paragon
Of loveliness and hid behind a cloud.
As from behind rich velvet curtains
She called me by my name and asked for Arthur.
And Arthur woke from his dream of death to see her
And quietly and surely said, as if still hale,

'It is you then, Morgen. Forgotten is the past.
Gone into limbo all my battles, gone my friends,
Gone all of them save Bedivere the brave --
And now erased with them imperial dreams
And trappings.
          Now there is you and you alone,
And I have come to be taken back again
Into the sweetness of your love for me.
Great was Arthur but he is great no more.
And now he wishes to reclaim himself
Beholding you. Long have I loved you, sister,
But now not much longer can it be. My death is very near.'

'And Morgen's hand like ductile silver lay
Cool on Arthur's brow. And so we laid him
Soft in the shallop -- and then they moved away
Such as I have never seen shadows move before,
A very triumph of silence and of ease,
Two mortals belonging each to splendid other,
Goodness in summary, and a consummation.

"And that was the last I ever saw of Arthur.
It was a night of the full moon. I think the moon
Was Morgen. I do not know. I know nothing of it --
I see it often but I do not think about it."

And Illtud made the cross and spoke,
"She took him thence for healing. It is said,
And I believe it, that countless years before
There came a certain Joseph faint with traveling --
He came to Glaston as if he knew the way,
Bearing the medicine of lightsome life
In a royal chalice jeweled as if with stones
Frozen of garnet blood. Or so the legend.
Perhaps on that island Tor death turned aside
From Arthur some brief time while angels sang
Verses for him far different from the tunes
Of wrath and battle. Surely he found the grail,
The holy chalice, there in the house of Mary.
And surely for a while it cured him.
Perhaps, who knows -- so wayward is the truth --
Perhaps the king lives on!"

"Nothing could have cured him of that wound,"
Said Bedivere. And the two bowed their heads
And stood before the past, as men stand gravely
Before a friend's door and dare not open it.

18

Merlin had said, before he died, he knew;
The tale was not concluded -- there was more.
Heavy the shame, the Saxon presence there
And harsh the penalties the Britons bore,
But that would end and Arthur would return.
Arthur lives still. He sleeps beneath a hill.

Merlin, the bent one who hobbled on the shingle
Sharing cove and headland with the wind,
With flotsam from far islands, with barnacles
And crabs and terraced rows of seaweed --
Merlin and the twisted, fitful tale
Of Arthur lived together. He spoke to all
Who listened, and he did this till the waves,
Querulous as ever, drowned out his voice.

This was the tenor of his tale.
"He did not die at Camlann ford, as said.
Nodens and Llyr and Bran the Blessed
Covered him with a mist so none might see.
Why should they not? Arthur was of all
The best of British chieftains, not once
Surpassed. Bedivere the brave
Took him to the mere where lived the Lady
And there delivered him to her and to
Her maidens -- so to the isle of Avalon
They went for healing. That Lady was Matrona,
An enchantress flying through the lunar light,
And she it was who came for Arthur.
And she it was who closed his wound and bound it up.
That is the way it was, and that I know.
The lady dipped into the golden cup of Gwyn
And Arthur, drinking, was healed to live again.
From that mystic cup, that cauldron, words issue,
Words immortal, encomiums of wonder.
Arthur died not. He will return
A king once more, his right hand on his sword,
The British sword I gave him, Caliburn.
He waits within the hill, within the Tor."

19

What is the meaning of this Arthur,
The man who strode between closed hangings
Upon whom no light shone from either world
In which he lived? If a nothing, still he has
a name forever.

Perhaps he lived only to be a name
A revenant subdued, a dim processing shade
So weary that the sun's rays are not blocked
And no shadow falls from him from either sun.
How can a man be not a man, a name
Only and a nothing?

Somewhere, if only within himself, he lived
And his eyes sparkled and his lips moved,
Somewhere a babe was born and moved to youth,
Became -- and who knows how -- a man historic
Hammering upon his age, an iron flail.
And somewhere he died in pride and violence.
Somewhere in humbleness he died.
And somewhere he died in love.

How much was Arthur?

Let the chromatic and never-ending rider
Hurtle on into myopic action,
As always and still today, on men's tongues,
Let him ride ever so fast, let him leave behind
A whirling wake of shadows, a tumbling
Of incoherent and elusive names,
Abandoned like splintered shards of darkness.
So will keep on, in legend riding, Arthur.

But somewhere in the sun there was a man
Who left a shadow, a man named Arthur.