an excerpt from the book

Harold

I

That’s where she lives, beyond the foggy horizon,
daughter of the dark North Sea’s agèd king.
She rules a little island in the amethystine blue
where white seabirds rest on their furthest flights.

They rest there, leaving down and moulted feathers
in frost-colored eddies on the sand.
Foam-bordered waves, ruddy in the dawn light,
are all that covers the princess
swimming naked in the surge.

Sunrise wakes her, moonlight soothes her,
her clothes are seaweed green, her comb’s the gold
of sunken treasure, in the current the curls
of her honey-colored hair, honey-slow, unfurl.

She sings by starlight, naked, playing her harp.
She laughs to see the sails of Norman pirates
far off, white, flying before the wind.

II

Harold’s Song

“On a wondrous stormy day, when the wind from the wings
of a tempest churns the sea milk-white and hides the reefs,
when even seagulls fight for life,
struggling to make shore,
with nearly human cries;

“hippocamps, sea-monsters, half-horse, half-fish,
whipped on by the wind, rear up, water pouring
off them in liquid silver, hooves tearing
at the air. I leap on the back of the foremost,
hold onto its mane
and rebellious neck.

“I spur you on with the butt of my spear,
O fierce Hippocamp! I,
the exiled archangel,
son of the bitter abyss!

“We fly through the waves, my mount dishevels the sea,
wild with rage and despair.
There ahead is the North Sea’s daughter on her isle.”

III

Knees clamped to the scaly monster’s flanks,
he himself scaled and shiny as a fish
in his silver armor, blond Harold charges,
singing as he does when he goes into battle.

The beaten hippocamp now tamely obeys.
Harold’s horn announces his wedding day
as he storms the sea king’s blue castle.

The princess strokes the muzzle of the hippocamp,
smiling, naked in the waves, she seems
like a lily in a pale blue stream.
The sky turns wintry gray,

and already the waters have closed over them both,
devouring the dream. The flood of the real
dissolving, as it always does, the ideal.