Love in the Last Days Read online

  obsessive wheedling finch, indifferent wren,

  heartbroken nightingale, ironic cuckoo.

  She never answered. Brangien fetched me at midnight.

  2

  I stepped into the Queen’s gray eyes and crossed the horizon.

  During the dry-mouth moment together, I spoke in platitudes

  of Avalon, Island of Immortality, how our grief

  will have no body to house it, and batter against those shores,

  but those cliffs are granite and there are paths

  only the goats know, and the fisher martens, and the newly dead.

  I told her of Ysinvitrain, further north, the Glass Kingdom,

  where all things are transparent, bread and the knife to cut it,

  even the invisible wound, even a lover’s mind, and the eye itself.

  I realized I was babbling about death, like a child

  who found a feather, and I forced myself to compliment her

  on her hair knot, her obsidian clasp. She was so vivid

  I could not look at her directly, even when I was on top of her.

  It was like praising a fire. She stopped listening.

  When I caught my breath—always during the meetings my breath

  surged against me—she prodded me with questions:

  Where could a boat land under those screes? Then the encounter

  was over. We had slept together. Or not. I said good-bye

  as you might take leave of night itself. In the third watch

  I was almost happy to be me, just another sword, paid off

  with a title, allowed to doze armed cap-à-pie in the royal chamber

  among the alaunts’ hot mouths, and dream of the King’s bed.

  3

  Alone, I could almost see and touch her, when we made love

  she was faes, the caul of the Absolute hid her naked body.

  The Grail

  Tristan

  1

  We subdued a village at the edge of Morois—

  a toothless hag scraping a bloody sheepskin, a cripple planing

  a board of knotty pine, a child plucking a crow, a few girls,

  dizzy with hunger, stumbling in the fuller’s ditch,

  sweat sticking burlap dresses to spindleshanks.

  How their dogs’ eyes widened when we came riding out of the brush,

  out of the play of light and shadow, with our crested plumes,

  Toledo steel and argent-gules escutcheon.

  We lined the men at spearpoint and asked: Have you seen the Grail?

  And they asked: What Grail? We were at a loss there.

  It was Iseult’s obsession and our desire to be perfect for her,

  to be good on the bloody earth, so that God would love us

  and lift that long stalemate: death without end, or grace.

  Allegedly it was a jar that held Christ’s blood, now empty.

  We cupped our hands, describing it, and the manants pointed vaguely.

  Perhaps there, in Morois, where the fires burn all summer?

  There, in the Fosse Commune, the fever bog? If they had not tried

  to trick us—if a child hadn’t mimicked our cupped hands—

  we reared back on our destriers and left those mud-daubed cabins

  wreathed in flames—lance to the banked coals,

  thrust to the wattle—and rode on in silence

  in the chill of evening with the smell of smoke

  growing a little stronger at each trick of the wind

  and every path we chose was one they had suggested.

  2

  That mighty adventure eluded us.

  I could not you tell what it is: a cup, a dish, a trophy,

  Joseph of Arimathea’s chipped vessel: a mystery to give us

  the power over ourselves that we have over others.

  All we had to show the Queen was wounds: Borhold

  his mangled thumb, Bors his sutured belly,

  Palafox his missing eyelid.

  My wound displayed no scab, no blemish.

  No flailing axe made it, no pot of lit oil.

  Yet it was me she chose. Tristan, show me your wound.

  The King’s Chamber

  Tristan

  A gazehound, dozing with eyes open,

  stared at me with a profound knowing ignorance.

  His nostrils flared, inhaling my lineage

  and venal sin, without interrupting his dream.

  I crept into the bedroom and lay among the dogs:

  Castilian alaunts with ears trimmed to points,

  who sleep in armor, dim-witted mastiffs, so imitative

  they might nip a spurred horse, terriers

  trembling to flush out imaginary enemies.

  Each snored according to his breed.

  Elkhounds snoozed on top of otterhounds.

  Beagles hunted in obsessive unreal circles.

  Greyhounds rippled with trance sprints. So dogs too

  have a voice that tells them not to act in dreams.

  My own mutt curled up at a distance, ashamed to know me.

  The kennets and harriers twitched and writhed,

  from their thick faint furious cries I deduced

  a wounded rabbit, a feist in heat, an adored master,

  as Apollonius says we surmise a world from the evidence

  of our uncontrollable senses. Sometimes a sleeper drooled

  on my cheek, or pinned my wrist with a paw,

  or enclosed my ankle with a soft in-bite

  exactly like the pang of my own dreams.

  Once I drowsed and woke with a scabrous tongue

  curling in my mouth. A bloodhound glanced at me

  with lugubrious cloudy eyes, and when I started,

  rolled to the wall with an absent moan.

  So loudly they slept in a vortex of breath

  on the straw bed, among bones gnawed to shards,

  while snow tumbled like dice in a high slit window

  and two guards slept upright, leaning on spears.

  Out of that roar of panting and muffled cries

  I heard Iseult’s breath, a thread I followed

  all the way back to childhood, to the first night

  when my mother died birthing me in the birch forest.

  Then I crawled onto that high oak bed

  and snuggled between the monarchs. He murmured thickly,

  darling, I answered in a thin voice, darling.

  I turned to my Queen and in that darkness

  we thought to enter the pupil of God’s eye

  before he created us, when he was surprised

  the light he made to end his loneliness was good.

  We loved each other as we are commanded to, politely,

  efficiently, with the King’s dreaming arm covering us,

  until the cock crowed at false dawn

  and a faint bell tolled matins.

  I whispered good-bye and slithered over bunched pugs

  who shivered with a milder, more inward twitch,

  beginning to negotiate endings to their dreams,

  commencing to know each other and trade soft nips.

  Their eyes lit, but not yet with the light of the mind.

  I passed like a thought between the spearheads

  and vanished down the winding torchlit corridors.

  I reached my chamber, bolted the door,

  congratulated myself and stumbled

  because I was walking in blood. That secret joy

  had reopened my wound and a trail led back

  from my cold bed to the King’s embrace.

  The trumpet sounded fortissimo wake, wake,

  about to crack in the cold.

  Escape

  Tristan

  I don’t remember how I passed the portcullis.

  I slipped into the hedgerows to wait for a sign.

  But nothing. Bells tolling nones, fornication, lauds,

  betrayal, angelus, judgment, all
ran together

  as if time were a single moment.

  I had made a tourniquet of a strip of arras.

  Despite my tremor, the wound closed.

  I had slipped in one night from knight to thief.

  Not just adulterous but dishonored.

  Not just a traitor, a coward.

  I realized what it cost to love Iseult.

  I thought fol’amor would be a lacerating fire.

  It deadened me to white ash.

  I thought to make a promise I could keep or break.

  It sealed me out of my life.

  I was damned. But I could reason backwards

  and explain my flight.

  If I was taken, truth would be tortured out of me.

  Since I hid, the King might grant her innocence

  and condemn me. The proofs were just my absence

  and a line of bloody footprints.

  So I stared from a halo of serrated elm leaves

  at that castle intricate as a rich child’s toy.

  Banners and pinions billowed and sank.

  Drawbridges rose and fell. Plumed hordes

  poured out with tiny raised spears, then swarmed back.

  My eye caressed a single high blank window.

  How I hoped Iseult would denounce me.

  If she claimed I forced her, I could return

  and hang like a manant. But I knew her silence.

  It’s invincible. Even her words are silent.

  Her very thoughts. I rubbed nettles on my face,

  tore my clothes, pretended to be mad

  and mumbled on the berms of a famine village

  where serfs comment on the mishaps of the rich.

  At nightfall I overheard news.

  The Queen had been given to a leper.

  The Leper

  Ivain

  I was asked politely to stand in my open grave

  and recite: Of my own free will I choose

  to wear this pointed cap,

  this black jute hauberk

  with a muslin placket fastened with twine.

  Our Lord was a leper, but because of my sins

  I promise never to caress a child,

  never touch a well rope, never eat from a dish,

  never marry, never enter a mill,

  church, fair, market or narrow lane.

  Yet I looked no different from them.

  In all their pictures, there were pustules.

  I had none. Still the children

  drew me in dust and called me “pustule.”

  I had to refrain from answering.

  The breeze was my master. I had to maneuver myself

  downwind when spoken to.

  They said I had been conceived in menopause,

  in coitus frigidi or calidi,

  unclean like a rabbit or camel.

  I had a little bell to ring constantly. At first

  my wrist ached. Later, in dreams, I missed that ringing.

  It made me invisible. I walked between winds.

  A farm girl came to me in secret

  between river and creek, between dusk and twilight.

  While we fucked I had to ring my bell

  or they would wake from that trance they called my sickness.

  I rang it with my foot and when I came

  they thought it was a carillon

  announcing another of the King’s wars.

  But when she was pregnant what could she do

  but sleep with a serf, marry him,

  spread her legs for the King?

  So I grew old in the narrow precinct of that name—leper.

  I wore an L of damask which slowly faded to dust.

  I grew dull with the belled cat and blinkered nag.

  It was rumored I would die, if not in a year

  in a decade or an instant.

  But desire burned me when I saw my love

  grown fat and mild with a brood of children.

  What had touched me? Not even a breath—a breeze.

  Not even a word: a name.

  How could I suffer when I had to constantly sing

  De Profundis in a small aggrieved voice?

  I had the same hunger you do,

  and the stray dogs and sparrows—

  the hunger to be touched, like a knife between my legs.

  Then the criers told me

  I was to be given the Queen.

  The King was sulking

  because she had known a vassal.

  They brought her bound to my hut.

  One of them stood outside

  ringing my bell for me

  while another cried: De Profundis.

  The Queen slept on the inside of the pallet

  with her hands as a pillow, trying not to touch the straw,

  making herself small, her hair in her mouth against the stench

  and I was at last allowed to blow out my candle

  and lie in darkness, hers and mine.

  We talked for a few hours—

  I was a lazar, she was faes:

  Iseult, like the sound of rain

  that you might love for no reason.

  When I woke there was the imprint of her cheek

  hot beside me, and horsemen arriving and departing,

  self-important in the weakness of dawn.

  The guards gave me back the bell

  and told me to resume suffering

  but I had forgotten how.

  I felt only that small intimate fire.

  The L stood for the fifth letter of a dream.

  They showed me, with whips and swords,

  how they made each other suffer.

  To appease them I rang my bell,

  but softly, just for her, in that enchantment,

  leprosy, and the pines writhed in the trance of wind.

  Rescue

  Tristan

  Iseult and the leper lay snoring on a pallet.

  I didn’t wake them. I sheathed my sword.

  I carried my Queen to the waiting roan.

  She came to with a soft cry. We galloped

  towards the interior: at first a stain at horizon

  then fallow earth, a thicket, at last the wild,

  that you enter like the ocean or a dream.

  You choose an entry no bigger than your body

  (my horse’s body, but I willed myself to think

  our horse, since we’d become a household in solitude).

  The supple catkins drew a net around us,

  oak with fat pleats at each tufted twig.

  We entered shadow. She was crying.

  I asked why. Tears answered. I was angry.

  I exposed my life to free her

  and risked the taint of pox. I reproached her.

  She replied with a strange bitterness

  I will come with you of my own free will

  into the heart of winter.

  The Horse

  Beau Joueur

  So we galloped towards Morois.

  Or rather, I galloped, Tristan spurred.

  Ahead of us the forest lay and soon towered

  —there is no path to enter, you enter

  by choice after forced choice, until

  it hurts like fate: duck, swerve and squeeze

  between almost-clearing and almost-thicket

  constrained by the rhythm of gaps between trunks,

  zones of ignorance between those lordly names

  PINE​ CEDAR​ OAK ​ROWAN ​YEW ​SYCAMORE ​BIRCH.

  The play of light and shadow intensified

  and we were inside, as if inside the mind,

  where you can only be in one thought, infinitely far

  from all other thoughts, and all thoughts are equal.

  He thought of her, she thought of winter.

  Or so I surmise. Her hand held the reins

  with such subtlety I could have been ruled

  by God’s will or the night wind.

  So we ente
red Morois. Had it been Brocéliande,

  Forest of Enchantment, or Le Mans, Forest of Majesty,

  or even Gorre, Forest of the Dead, someone might have thought

  to curry me, find me brackish water, perhaps comb

  the chafing burrs from my hopelessly tangled mane.

  But this was Morois, Forest of Love, and I just stumbled

  forwards, and forwards again, as if there were no past

  or future, waiting for that prick in my salty flank.

  Everyone in This Story Speaks Except Me

  Iseult

  Even the words. The chords. The silence. I can only think.

  I miss my father’s Galway house, the crisp bed I made myself.

  Call me ruthless but these days whirl forwards.

  I am Queen of the Land of No Sleep. Why do they give me power?

  I love him for no reason, as you might laugh at the pine breeze.

  But he will test every gesture in Morois.

  Once we could make each other strange as dawn just by undoing

  one button, always the same button. Now we run to the shadows.

  Once Satan appeared to Saint Marie d’Oignies and whispered,

  This world is a dream. She answered, Can’t you hear the leper’s bell?

  Now the first pines rise out of the cornrows, the elm crest

  looms suddenly, we come to the threshold, the last hedgerow.

  The horse rolls his red-veined eye. How Tristan must spur.

  The Absolute drives him. The charm of wholeness.

  But God is a broken man. A person and the loss of a person.

  Yew branches draw back like bows. An opening will find us.

  Now to learn what a servant knows. Cold and hunger.

  How not to eat or sleep. How not to have a child.

  Morois

  The Play of Light and Shadow

  Tristan

  We want to give ourselves away utterly

  but afterwards we resent it. It’s the same

  with the sparrows, their eyes burn so coldly

  under the dusty pines, their small chests swell

  as they dispute a crumb, or the empty place

  where a seed was once. This is our law too,

  to peck and peck at the self, to take turns

  being I, to die in a fierce sidelong glance,

  then to hold the entire thicket in one tilt

  of a tufted head, to take flight suddenly