Tetrapod, Valentia Island

 No more? A monster then, a dream,

 A discord. Dragons of the prime,

That tare each other in their slime.

Were mellow music match’d with him.

(Tennyson, In Memoriam, Section LV1)

       I.

       Squadrons of bombers are trundling slowly

       Towards runways, and the North Atlantic

       Aligning itself towards Belgrade. A nation

       Is hacking itself into nationalities, and maps

       Are being crumpled and refolded, as I see

       For the first time the prints of the tetrapod

       That emerge briefly from under layered rocks

       And drag themselves across a wet, sunlit slab.

       Words like sedimentary and Devonian

       Settle themselves ponderously around me,

       As if forever. But metamorphic also

       Insists on its own place, squeezes itself

       Into the surrounding nomenclature,

       Admits feathery lichens and anemones

       Volcaniclastically into deep fissures

       Where mussels dream of equatorial mud.

II.

       Tennyson dreamed here, in 1848,

       Brooding over huge Atlantic waves,

       While the eruptions of that year in Europe

       Ebbed beside them into nothingness.

       And, knowing nothing of these footprints,

       He wrestled with the Terrible Muse, Geology,

       As monsters reared their unimaginable heads

       Above libraries, towers and steeples that tottered

       Over swamps once thought to have been stone,

       And Darwin’s worms covered the bones of saints,

       The heroic skulls of every momentous battle,

       With soil excreted and accreted into continents.

III.

       Here language has run riot. Cuan Bhéil Inse

       Is gentrified despite itself into Valentia Harbour,

       And Dolus Head, named by raiding Norsemen,

       Squats runically above the straits near Beiginis.

       Here are layers of language and conquest,

       Of equatorial mud, of bog and glacial drift,

       Shifting and eroding. Here is the slow thump

       Of continents colliding, of language turn by turn

       Proclaiming separation and whispering integration.

       Here are the slow, oscillating steps

       Of almost four hundred million years,

       Tentative still in their terraqueous world.

IV

       The news is not good. Forces are gathering

       Along the fault lines between continents.

       Crowds are chanting on either side of bridges.

       Geology is not so terrible a muse.

       As geopolitics plotted by satellite.

       The generals turn their heads from their screens,

       Six hundred miles from the valleys of death,

       To deliver briefings in a strange language

       Illuminating everything but the reason why

       The stones of fallen cathedrals and palaces

       Have built no more than dusty, cratered roads

       For the slow trail of refugees between borders.

V

       And the epigraph? The him is Mankind,

       Floundering in the wake of Genesis abandoned,

       Hymns being silenced by the chattering of apes,

       And history subsiding slowly into dust.

       But Tennyson had never known the whole world

       To tear itself twice over in its slime, nor seen

       The slime darkening the very skies. Surely despair,

       After all that, is the only rational position.

       And yet, in Valentia, in the spring of 1999,

       Here at the sea on the very edge of Europe,

       My heart applauds these floundering steps

       In warm alluvium metamorphosed to rock,

       Neither their beginning nor their end in sight.

       Behind the huge perspectives they create,

       Faintly, the hymn is Mankind. Depsair,

       After all, is the only rational position.