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Then through the quiet room a knock rang loud Upon the oaken door—and much relieved, Gawain stood up, thanked Arthur, quickly bowed, And stopped to see the hall held Guinevere. She smiled as she entered, waved them down And with a voice that seemed to ring with cheer Proclaimed: “my husband and my nephew—come! What are you doing here, while all draw near? Indeed, the feast already has begun And you are sitting here! Gawain, you mope, Whatever choices you have made are done And you returned, when we had little hope— Now come! The night is lightened with their joy And mine, and Arthur’s too—the bards dev

We didn’t mean for you to rise Up into the ashes of a martyr But you did; No one will criticize Now that your weight is lifted From the crushing earth. I feel all my groundedness— Roots tangle my feet, The soil grabs my breaking heart, My lungs clot with dirt. How must it feel, gazing down Wide and expansive, On our fragile, gasping bodies Buried under the ground We walked and knew and loved and fought— You lost. The grave resigns its hold On every martyred cause: Engulfed in the awful hope Of almost-victory And no reality to re-inscribe The weight of victory’s cost.

Midway between the wild and the tamed Enveloped with the smell of berry buds While herbs below so carefully are named On sunlight-burnished wood staked through the mud And where a living veil of shade withdraws To dapple scattered green on every stone I sat beneath it once, and there I saw A rain of silver blossoms overflowed. Now I am grown beyond that wistful child Who saw and never thought to wonder how A cultivated place could be so wild With leaves and blooms together on one bough And now I sit and breathe the depth of wonder Of worlds somehow between—and somehow sundered.

Stars shall not mark your devotion, the trees shall not bend to your voice and shells you caress from the ocean are silent to why you rejoice-- but under the stars you shine brighter and deep in the forests you grow still fairer and wiser and kinder no matter if anyone knows.

No draft of wellspring draws the same effusive sigh as wildflowers on the grass when windstorms fly in violent, happy, gusts through speckled shoots of blooms and cattail reeds bent over banks cut deep with clouding plumes. I feel in weathered breaths this sudden shock of spring: then drops of rain; your parted hair to which they cling, and suddenly the flush of overburdened clouds all rushing to the drier ground to weep their desperate joy aloud. The dampened scent of sweet enthralling gentle flowers enraptured in the air, weighed low from bowers of starlit blossom trees now settles on your skin and draws between your dusted touch to cloud

Now I am toiling in a sea of ruin against the rush of waves, and tearing grasp of algae underneath the clouding froth and battered up against the cracking rocks I reach and find my finger-tips are torn and every bulwark that I build is lost in shattered spars, and iron nails all scraped on beaten stone, and splintered wood. They fall to rust amongst a sand of crumpled shells. I build and build and all is swept away into the raging sea; into the fray of shipwreck sores on putrefying reefs where long-lipped fishes float, and spotted tails of swaying eels decay. An octopus crawls deeper in the darkness of his cave. I try to swim; the salt kee

His uncle stepped away, and slowly sighed “Gawain,” he said, “I don’t know what to say— You tell me that you wish that you had died, That fear of death has led you to betray Your honor and the oaths you once had sworn—“ He paused, and looked down where his nephew stayed Head bent over his hands—a ring adorned In gold, and cut with Orkney’s royal seal Lay there before him, sunlit-streaked and warm Upon the wooden table. Arthur kneeled Beside his silent nephew, took the ring And said, “Gawain, you tell me that you feel As if you failed yourself, and me, your king But that cannot be

The world is beyond my description no power can take from its grasp the flood of a sliver of sunlight between the tall trees, or the rasp of foam on the sand covered lakeshore caught up in its battering spray no, nothing is deep as the darkness nor kind as the day. And soon in the riotous springtime when hawthorn shall flower, and blooms alight every branch, and the lilies grow dappled within gentle gloom; when night shall be filled with the bruising of dew on the grass, and the trees then I shall imagine the glories you must once have seen. The world moves beyond all enduring you left, as the stars when the sun first rose overhead and the

We saw a crane. Its dipping beak broke through the brush of cattail stalks, and bent the slip of waves on weeds; of waves on sprawling blooms that rose against the swell, then fell. The limp of fungus-dusted foam flowed after it. We saw the arching flash of murdered fish its sun-caught scales a pierce of flame new-lit with all of beauty we could ever wish. You waded in the algae-green that grew on every scrap of shore. You sloughed thick mud beneath your feet, and let frayed roots crawl through each step—and you kept moving towards the blood. I know we are not water-birds, but I seeing you striving there, dreamed you could fly.

"Is there none will tell the King I love him though so late?" -Idylls of the King, Tennyson You never knew; if any saw him sail away to fairer lands, it was not you— who trapped inside endured the crushing view of empty plaster-wall. Instead you paled and wept, and watched the years passing away in folds around your veins, and rosaries of weathered beads, and in the way your knees shook as the stones grew colder every day. You never knew if he would come again; if you would join him there and speak of love and be anew all you once both had been but sometimes knowing nothing is enough. O Queen, you found your faith in bitter tears and