Canto X – Barum on the Taw

“Though sad at heart

Across the watery way a weary while must he

Stir with his hands the rime-cold sea,

Tread exile tracks: full pitiless is fate!”

-        The Wanderer

They were there to witness the timber lumps

heaped and squabbled into a burh –

and later saw the flash of shears and

traded riches bleed and blur;

from this peopled paean, rose a town

of rosy brick – the inner tower rising

higher and higher –

a perpetually leering,

four-faced-liar.

Unnoticed and forgotten, hiding

amidst the bony bric-a-brac

in their holts and hollows – they did

not expect the man to follow their

brown, bouncing thread –

shellshocked, gassed and disillusioned,

Williamson ceased to understand man

and his works and instead turned to them;

those needle-teethed denizens

of the watered world – slick

and bloody-whiskered wanderers,

whacking their club tails with all the gusto

of Jupiter’s thunder – they were honest,

more so, perhaps, than the world

he had left behind – they did not trick

or faun or placate their prey but sought

and pursued and pincered and

did not waver a single obsidian eye

from the Salmon’s lidded peeping,

but ripped and tore and feasted

and made crop circles out of the bone.

He trailed after their sodden paws

and parted reeds and crouched below

their clapper bridges, sharing

their apprehension of hunting hounds

and baying horns, watching

from afar this people’s strange ruck and reason –

witnessing once, the passing of a mother’s kitten,

knowing that he himself could not condemn

when more than any ideal or whim

he would rather flee his checkered reality

and become one of them.

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