Muss es sein? - Es muss sein!
 [epigraph to the final movement of Beethoven's last quartet]
 

A thousand feet high and reaching massively south
from Teno light to the spruce margin of a tourist haven
ten miles away, a crinkled buttress of basalt braves
onslaught of seas that unremittingly strike and seethe.
This is the Acantilado: wandering fingers of light
fondle its riven face as the sun works round the day,
defining its ropes of rock, its clefts and courses and cavelets,
never two hours the same, yet changeless early and late.

It is worth more than a photograph from the deck of the boat
that brings its passengers to view the dolphins or take a dip
in the bay of Masca; merits more than a word from the
                                                                        trippers
at lunch by the pool, who ignore the sea's incessant beat.
This is an image of time and beyond time, a sign
capturing aeons complete in the lens of a round minute
out of the ceaseless tremor of earth's primeval skin:
a moment of the eternal in this noonday's particular scene.

Out in the sound, a fisherman in his blue-gunwaled skiff
is tending his flimsy nets, making a wayward killing
on a trading floor where current trends never hold still;
one error, and the mocking breakers clap and scoff;
wise, when the storm wind prompts, out of the pallid west
he'll run for Teno's bleak beach, or southward a mile
to Santiago, where the indispensable Virgin sits smiling
in her hut on the harbour wall, shelter from the ocean's
                                                                         worst.

And if I envy him it is not in some fey, addled belief
that a life of endangered toil is the virtuous life. No.
Nor I will not put his decent human pretensions lower
than anyone else's to goods and ease and consoling love;
But still I think the soul of him less able to come to harm
as long as his hunched and weathered hopes remain thus oddly
Poised between the stark Atlantic and the simple mother of
                                                                                God.

A free man? Free.  And sentenced. In prison, at home.

But the gull that floats alone in the lee of the huge rock,
a fragile pinnace of feathers, is more at home in her dwelling,
tenanted unconcernedly on the multiforming swell
that gathers and folds like a press, stretches and tugs like a
                                                                             rack.

Incertitude's her element; she keeps no account of what
the tale of moment by moment will bring. Hope and despair
are foreigners from the dry domain of human feeling. Her airy
trust in the tides of sky and sea shifts not a whit.

Doubt blurs my human eye; the agnostic I
composing this instant from the truculent wild of ocean,
scowl of the cliff, stillness of fisherman and bird; a gross
consort of accidentals, diminishing to a round O ö
rondo of now in time in now, a spiralling dance.
These forms converge crazily on my whorled reason.
Do I grasp a meaning that changes with light and breeze,
or am I, changeable, grasped ö helpless, dunce, dense?

Dreamer or dreamed-of ö that old conundrum we set ourselves:
if dreamed-of, must I pitch into nothing when the Dreamer wakes
from his terrible reverie; or if dreaming, will a daybreak
restore me to an inconceivable self? This riddle no one solves
or returns to unravel, though the question must be mine soon.

I feel the advent of a change, second by quavering second,
as the fisherman feels the sly nudge of the wind on his neck.
Time slips; the world melts; muss es sein?

Suddenly the gull soars, snowy-vanned, her broad
span sketching a Christ-cross on the virginal blue;
image of the soul's flight; nothing of earth pursuing,
she turns and pauses at heaven's porch like an entering
                                                                         bride;

es muss sein! And I proclaim the soul's existence, proclaim
against my own belief, against the coming dark; cry
how the spirit soars up again and again, flying
in the face of the chaos, reaching for glory in the long climb.

Cry against the dark. Where the dragon-tailed rollers
                                                                         writhe,
cry. We are not made to eat, drink and fester
in black earth; clogged in the worst, cry for the best,
then disgrace shows a semblance of honour, an also-runner's
                                                                             wreath.
But see ö the anguished second passes, the mountains stand,
Their doomsday grandeur ingrained in the still impassive
                                                                             features.
And green-coiled, spuming serpents roll to the beach
and welter and hiss and die in the black volcanic sand.