North and west along the coast, cradled by pine-scented wind, by infusion of hemlock, the long plains climbed into mountainous green, and everywhere forest and ocean, ocean and forest twined with the westernmost haze of the damaged horizons, until the traveler's fancy supposes Silvanost rising again in dreams of retrieval, but instead it is priest-ridden Istar, sacrifice-haunted, where freedom is incense, the long smoke rising destroyed in its own celebrations.
There in the branching seas, in warm waters harmful and northern, the wind took me westward skirting a desolate land.
IV
Now the sea is a level and heartless country, boiling with unsteady fires:
The salt air smothers the coastal lights, but the mast, the shipped oars, ignite with the corposant, and all through the water a green incandescence, and often at night the coastline is dark, obscured by the luminous reef by the Phoenix of Habbakuk, low in the canceling west, and the wind and the water are borrowed and inward as light.
And on those same nights, on the face of the waters, unexplainable darkness embarks from the starboard to port like a dream beneath memory as though from the ocean a new land is rising, proclaimed by the distant and alien calls of the whales.
The compass needle flutters and falls into vertiginous waters, and waking to sunlight fractured on spindrift, the impervious jade of the ocean below you, you dismiss the night, you turn it away, which is why this song returns to you quietly at full noon, when the assembled sea is changing past thought and remembrance above the eternal currents.
And now the northerlies rising fierce, equatorial, the madman's wind, the mistrals of prophecy, guiding me into the bay.