Love-Children

The trail’s high up on the ridge, no one goes down
But the east wind and the falling water the concave slope without a name to the little bay
That has no name either. The fish-hawk plunges
Beyond the long rocks, rises with streaming silver; the eagle strikes down from the ridge and robs the fish-hawk;
The stunted redwoods neither grow nor grow old
Up the steep slope, remembering winter and the sea-wind; the ferns are maiden green by the falling water;
The seas whiten on the reefs; nothing has changed
For a thousand years, ten thousand. It is not a thousand, it is only seventy, since man and woman came down
The untrampled slope, forcing a trail through lupine
And mountain laurel; they built a hut against the streamside; the coast cannot remember their names.
They had light eyes and white skins, and nobody knew
What they fled, why they came. They had children in this place; loved while they clung to the breast but later
Naked, untaught, uncared for, as wild as foxes,
A boy and a girl; the coast remembers they would squat beside a squirrel’s earth until the furred thing
Crept out, then what the small hands caught the teeth
Would tear living. What implacable flame of passion I wonder left its children forgotten
To eat vermin and the raw mussels of the rock?
Love at the height is a bad hearth-fire, a wolf in the house to keep the children. I imagine languors,
Sick loathing, miserable renewals, blind insolence
In the eye of the noon sun. They’d stripped to bathe, desire on the salted beach between the skerries
Came bronze-clawed like a hawk; the children to see
Was the deep pearl, the last abandonment. They lived twelve years in the hut beside the stream, and the children
Died, and the hut is fallen and vanished, the paths
Filled with thicket and vanished utterly. Nothing remains. Certainly a flame burned in this place;
Its lamps wandered away, no one knows whither.
The flaming oil-drops fell and burned out. No one imagines that ghosts move here, at noon or at midnight.
I’m never sorry to think that here’s a planet
Will go on like this glen, perfectly whole and content, after mankind is scummed from the kettle.
No ghost will walk under the latter starlight.
The little phials of desire have all been emptied and broken. Here the ocean echoes, the stream’s like bird-song;
The stunted redwoods neither grow nor grow old
Up the steep slope, remembering winter and the sea-wind; the ferns are maiden green by the falling water;
The seas whiten on the reefs; the fish-hawk plunges
Beyond the long rocks, rises with streaming silver; the eagle strikes down from the ridge and robs the fish-hawk.