On the Marginal Way

by Richard Wilbur


         Another cove of shale,
 But the beach here is rubbled with strange rock
     That is sleek, fluent, and taffy-pale.
 I stare, reminded with a little shock
 How, by a shore in Spain, George Borrow saw
 A hundred women basking in the raw.

         They must have looked like this,
 That catch of bodies on the sand, that strew
     Of rondure, crease, and orifice,
 Lap, flank, and knee— a too abundant view
 Which, though he'd had the lenses of a fly,
 Could not have waked desire in Borrow's eye.

        Has the light altered now?
 The rocks flush rose and have the melting shape
     Of bodies fallen anyhow.
 It is a Gericault of blood and rape,
 Some desert town despoiled, some caravan
 Pillaged, its people murdered to a man,

        And those who murdered them
 Galloping off, a rumpling line of dust
     Like the wave's white, withdrawing hem.
 But now the vision of a colder lust
 Clears, as the wind goes chill and all is greyed
 By a swift cloud that drags a carrion shade.

        If these are bodies still,
 Theirs is a death too dead to look asleep,
      Like that of Auschwitz' final kill,
 Poor slaty flesh abandoned in a heap
 And then, like sea-rocks buried by a wave,
 Bulldozed at last into a common grave.

        It is not tricks of sense
 But the time's fright within me which distracts
     Least fancies into violence
 And makes my thought take cover in the facts,
 As now it does, remembering how the bed
 Of layered rock two miles above my head

        Hove ages up and broke
 Soundless asunder, when the shrinking skin
     Of Earth, blacked out by steam and smoke,
 Gave passage to the muddled fire within,
 Its crannies flooding with a sweat of quartz,
 And lathered magmas out of deep retorts

        Welled up, as here, to fill
 With tumbled rockmeal, stone-fume, lithic spray,
     The dike's brief chasm and the sill.
 Weathered until the sixth and human day
 By sanding winds and water, scuffed and brayed
 By the slow glacier's heel, these forms were made

        That now recline and burn
 Comely as Eve and Adam, near a sea
     Transfigured by the sun's return.
 And now three girls lie golden in the lee
 Of a great arm or thigh, and are as young
 As the bright boulders that they lie among.

        Though, high above the shore
 On someone's porch, spread wings of newsprint flap
     The tidings of some dirty war,
 It is a perfect day: the waters clap
 Their hands and kindle, and the gull in flight
 Loses himself at moments, white in white,

        And like a breaking thought
 Joy for a moment floods into the mind,
     Blurting that all things shall be brought
 To the full state and stature of their kind,
 By what has found the manhood of this stone.
 May that vast motive wash and wash our own.