Voyage of the Saintes-Maries

I, the sick seaman from the unspoken north
Firing my vessel on the sacred strand
Mark now how Lazarus with unbandaged breath
Clasps my cold fingers in a warm, clay hand
Casts his killed eye upon the breaking bay
Where in their bibled boat the Maries stand
Pouring a plaster blessing on the day
As he winds his white ship of saints to land.

This barque, they said, built of the Jesus tree
Launched by twin thieves and held by holy nails
We now deliver from the dying sea,
Dry in the diving sky its shroud of sails.
Descending from the water’s written stair
Marie Salomé, at the struck ship’s fore
Marie Jacobé, branched with burning hair
Passed without print upon the stealing shore.

Where the slit sea-grass guts the shoals of air
We build our church, they said, upon this sand.
On each stone, stuck to perfect stone with prayer
The river rubs with fifty-fingered hand.
With ropes of water and with ropes of light
We hoist these syllables of sticks, of spars
As in the silence of the shifting night
Walks the mad moon its cemetery of stars.

In the blacked church before the noise of candles
I see the saints in springs of fire sown,
Read with a risen eye the wrist that handles
The starting water as if it were stone,
And with the reliquaries of the sun
In architraves of air your talking bone
Sets with sharp flowers for flames. You speak of one
Who murdered death and from the grave has flown.

Now from your trap of towers bursts the bell
With turning tongue upon the travelled sky.
Before the fevers of your blazing cell
Fishermen, cowboys, shipwrecked lovers lie.
August goddesses, on your sleep of stone
I see the paint’s blood, the burned words of wire
The sawdust tears upon the city sown,
But at your feet the fire, the holy fire.