The boat tugged its anchor, and the anchor flew up from the seabed like an iron arrow and hung poised in a new wind and pointed over the corkscrew channels of the sea to the dark holes and caves in the horizon. He saw birds soaring out of the pitted distance blind by his anchor as he swam with a seal at his side to the boat that stamped the water. He gripped on the bows like a mane, the arrowing anchor shot north, and the boat sped beneath it with winds and invisible fire puffing and licking. His animal boat split the water into a thousand boat-sized seas, bit deep into the flying shoals, halved and multiplied the flying fishes, it dived under waves like a wooden dolphin and wagged the fingering wrack off its stern, it swerved past a black and gold buoy with cathedral chimes and kept cold north. Spray turned to ice as it whipped through his hair, and pierced his cheeks and eyelids, and the running blood froze hard. He saw through a coat of red ice that the sea was transparent; under his boat the drowned dead burned in a pale-green, grass-high fire; the sea rained on the flames. But on through the north, between glass hills on which she-bears climbed and saw themselves reflected, eating the sea between the paddling floes, a shell of lightning fibres skimming and darting under an anchorbolt, tossed and magnified among the frozen window weeds, through a slow snowstorm whose flakes fell like hills one at a time down the white air, lost in a round sudden house of the six-year night and slipping through an arch of sleeping birds each roosted on an icicle, the boat came into blue water. Birds with blue feathers set alight by the sun, with live flames for their crests, flew by the hovering anchor to the trees and bushes on the rims of the soft sand round the sea that brushed his boat slowly and whispered it like a name in letters of parting water towards a harbour grove and a slowly spinning island with lizards in its lap. The salmon of the still sail turned to the blue of the birds’ eggs in the tips of the fringing forest of each wave. The feathers crackled from the birds and drifted down and fell upon bare rods and stalks that fenced the island entrance, the rods and stalks grew into trees with musical leaves still burning. The history of the boat was spelt in knocking water on the hanging harbour bank; each syllable of his adventure struck on grass and stone and rang out in the passages of the disturbed rock plants and was chattered from flame to tree. The anchor dived to rest. He strode through the blazing fence. The print of the ice was melting. The island spun. He saw between trees a tall woman standing on the opposite bank. He ran directly towards her but the green thighs closed. He ran on the rim towards her but she was still the same distance from him on the roundabout island. Time was about to fall; it had slept without sound under and over the blaze and spinning; now it was raised ready. Flowers in the centre of the island caught its tears in a cup. It hardened and shouted and shone in dead echoes and pearls. It fell as he ran on the outer rim, and oaks were felled in the acorn and lizards laid in the shell. He held the woman drowning in his arms, her driftwood limbs, her winking ballast head of glass; he fought with her blood like a man with a waterfall turning to fishdust and ash, and her salvaged seaweed hair twisted blindly about his eyes. The boat with anchor hovering and finned oars trembling for water after land, the beaks at the stern gabbling and the shells alive, was blown alongside him, by a wind that took a corner on one breath, from the harbour bank where roots of trees drove up the sky and foliage in cinders smouldered down, the lopped leg of a bird scratched against rock, a thundering cave sat upright and bolted mouthdown into the sea; he dipped the gills of the oars, the cedarmast shook like a cloth, warm north the boat sped off again from an island no longer spinning but split into vanishing caves and contrary trees. Time that had fallen rested in the edges of its knives and the hammock of its fires, the memory of the woman was strong on his hands, her claws and anemones, weedwrack and urchin hair, the sea was deserted and colourless, direction was dead as the island and north was a circle, a bird above the anchor spurted through a stationary cloud to catch its cry, the boat with gilled oars swimming ploughed through the foam in the wake, her pale brow glistened in the new moon of his nails and the drenched thread of her nerves sprang up and down behind them, the stern beaks quacked and yawned, crabs clacked from the shells, a mist rose up that dressed and unshaped the sky and the sea flowed in secret. Through the mist, dragging a black weather with it, a spade-shaped shoal of clouds tacked to its peak, a broken moon, a wind with trumpets, came a mountain in a moment. The boat struck rock. The beaks were still. The shells snapped shut. He leaped into mud as the wind cried his name to the flapping shoals; his name rolled about the mountain, echoed through caves and crevices, ducked in venomous pools, slap on black walls, translated into the voice of dying stone, growling through slime into silence. He gazed at the mountain peak; a cloud obscured it, cords of light from the moon were looped around the tentacles of the crags. Lightning with a horn and bone on, with gristle white as a spine hardening and halving the forked sides, struck through the tacked cloud cap, lit the stone head, scorched the mist-curled fringe, cut through the cords until the moon sailed upwards like a kite. With the turning out of the lightning, the jackknife doubling up of the limp spine, the weather in tow rocked to work and flight in a sealed air, the mountain vanished leaving a hole in space to keep the shape of his horror as he sank, as the monuments of the dark mud toppled and his raised arms were cemented against rock with the wet maggot sacks and the mixed, crawling breasts of statues and creatures who once stood on the ledges of the mountain foot or blocked the crying mouths of caves. The wind, blowing matter with a noise, stuck to his cheek. The sea climbed his limbs like a sailor. Bound and drowning in that dismembered masonry, his eyes on a level with the shuffled circle of headpieces floating, he saw the lightning dart to strike again, and the horned bone stiffen among the forks; hope, like another muscle, broke the embraces of the nuzzling bodies, thrust off the face that death-masked his, for the mountain appeared on the strike of light and the hollow shape of his horror was filled with crags and turrets, rock webs and dens, spinning black balconies, the loud packed smashing of separate seas, and the abominable substances of a new colour. The world happened at once. There was the furnished mountain built in a flash and thunderclap colliding. The shapes of rain falling made a new noise and number. And the lightning stayed striking; its charted shaft of sawteeth struck and bit in continual light; one blind flash was a year of mornings. The mummyfolds, the mudpots, the wet masks, the quick casts, the closing sheathes, melted under the frostbite heat of that unwinking lightning. He boxed free from the statues and the caved and toppling watchers. From a man-sized dent in a melting thigh he came up strung with shells and mussed with weed like a child from the roots of the original sea into a dazzling bed. Once on hard land, with shells that swung from his hair ringing from the tail of a weed, and shells repeating the sea, he shook away calamity, bounced the weeds off his bare breast, threw back his head until the pealing shells took in their echo the voices of all miscellaneous water, and grappled with the mountainside. His shadow led and beckoned; he turned curves of the eel-backed paths, his shadow pointed to the footprints that appeared before his feet; he followed where his footprints led, saw the smudged outline of his hand on a wet stone as he quarreled with stones and trees towards it up an attacking valley; animals closed their lips round the shout of a wind walking by and scooped his name to welcome it up hollow trunks and walls. He followed the flight of his name: it slipped to a stop at the peak: there a tall woman caught the flying name to her lips. He flourished in the middle of the pain of the mountain and joy sped with his shadow, the strong memory of the driftwrack woman was dead on his hands digging deep in the soil towards this stranger tall as a pulled tree and whiter at that great and shortening distance than the lightning-coloured sea a hundred dangers below. The thighs smooth as groundstone and sensual cleft, limped eye and musselmouth, the white boulders bent, blue shadows and pricked berries, the torrential flowers and blacks of the bush on the skull and the muffed pits, the draped cellars, the lashed stones, the creased face on the knees, all for a moment while he stood in love were still and near. Then slowly her peak in a cloud’s alcove—carved animals on an abbey, wind in an amice, arching accusing her—rose with his lovely dashing from stillness. Slowly her peak got up the cloudy arches, the stones he stumbled on followed her at the same speed. Though he hugged like a bear and climbed fast, she kept her distance from him. The mountain in the intervals of his breathing grew many times its size until time fell and cut and burned it down. The peak collapsed, the mountain folded, he clasped the woman diminishing in his arms; the downpours of her hair were short falls, her limbs stunted, her hands blunt, her teeth were small and square as dice and the rot marked them. A halo cracked like china, wings were spoked. Blood flapped behind all the windows of the world. And with the wasting of her limbs suddenly she grew young. Holding her small body, he cried in the nightmare of a naked child kissing and blaspheming close, breasts small as peaks with milk foaming from them, the innocent holes of the open eyes, the thin, rouged musselmouth, when the head falls, the eyes loll, the small throat snaps, and the headless child lies loving in the dark. The mad bug trotted in at the ear with the whole earth on a feeler. With his cries she caved in younger. He held her hard. The marrow in her bones was soft as syrup. From a scar in the peak came a shadow with black gamp and scarlet basin. She dangled there with bald and monstrous skull, bunched monkey face, and soaked abdominal tail. Out of the webbed sea-pig and water-nudging fish a white pool spat in his palm. Reeling to run seaweed and away, he trod the flats of waves. The splintered claw of a crab struck from the killed hindershells. And, after the anchor burrowing through blind cloud, he rowed and sailed, that the world might happen to him once, past the events of revolving islands and elastic hills, on the common sea.