October 2001

National Theatre of Wales

Metaphysics yields to art and I discover angels in the sea,
an eyeless threat to silence; a chemical refined by doubt.
Her name; Camille for all I know these years away,
a picture dropped in all these storms and voices.

I fall enchanted, unmechanical, to love her like a seabird;
a white Pacific Tern, a delicate and brilliant thing,
forever flying, given sustenance through air and sun,
brought exhausted to the edge of islands at the limits of this day.

And in the dark of puppetry, the sea makes accidents
of dresses, feeble clothes that spark at any touch.
The hidden hands bring light to us, and drums, a heart
to match my own, the easy Civil war of couples.

The sea defines the world for us, this white noise,
the tangled beds, the long imagined passion;
it magnifies, makes real the dreamt embrace of loss
of love, and paler skin, of illness and religion.