Remember that we are dust. It is said
That this place of our passage is prone to mirages:
That the waves of the drifting desert, the heat-daft
Air playing like water-light, the horizon
Swirling slow as a shadow and laying up
To itself all their unearthly shiftings,
Or simply the salt tides working
Of need or desire, out of some fold
Of their flowing raise often visions
As of white cities like walled clouds, agleam
On their hills, so clear that you can see the tiered
Buildings glint still in the rocking daylight,
Or again of trees even whose shadows
Seem green and to breathe, or merely of pools
Of simple water on that same dry surge borne,
That will ride nearer, nearer, like elusive
Aphrodite; and these are nothing
But the playing of the heated light teasing
Like pain over this dust. In truth, it may
Be nothing but ourselves, this that is
All about us for our eves to see: this dust
That we cannot see beyond. Remember
That we are dust, dust and a little breath,
As the sand dervishes the wind lifts
Whirling and sends over the sea-shaped dunes;
As does their dancing, we wind between breathless
Dust and breathless dust, and our passage
Even as theirs, may be no more
Than a casual sport of the air gliding
To no depth over the delusive surface
Of our breathless selves. But speaking of virtues
We think of water; moving, we think
Of arrival as of water, of virtue
As the means of arrival. And we have named
For water him who is visibly
Our practice of virtue, beast of our motion,
Calling him “Ship of the Desert.” Who rolls
When he walks; whose going also
Has strangely the gait of a cradle. He too is dust,
Yet not as we, save as that figure
Of what our faring is, for his breath is speechless,
His back that bears us has a wave’s shape
Drawn by a child; or hill’s lurching
As he strides; when he runs, his shadow
Over the rippling dust is a wind’s
Shudder across modelled bay-water,
Curved gust across grain-field, or storm silvering
Fast as some hastening angel over
Hillsides of olive trees, darkness
Of rain-cloud chasing the sunlight
On carved hills, or wave-crest over
Far reef flung, its main strength still racing
For shore. Even as these
It would seem our progress is, in itself bearing
Its own sustenance for long waste-wending;
A power that may be, in event of all
Arrival failing, other resources
Parched, our water of desperation; that is not
Ourselves; whose capacities may not be
Arrived at even by prayer, patient study
And deprivation, yet whose presence we have known
To affect us so that even in places of water,
Of pleasure, repose, abode, when we had thought
To escape the sense of it, it will sometimes break
From where it was tethered and find us out,
Intruding its ungainly ill-smelling head
Over our shoulders. A creature that can shut
Both eyes and nostrils against the lash
Of dust risen suddenly savage. That if not
Drained at last dry as a white bone,
Exhausted beyond sense, or buried
In the capricious cruelty of
Its own condition, can sense more surely than we
Over the dust-driven horizon the green
Places where the roots grope trusting
Down into the dark breathlessness, the trees
Sway and give shade, dew falls early,
Stones drip in the mossed shadow, and the motes
Seem to dance to a falling cadence
That mortal ears might apprehend. Catching, as we,
At phantoms, breaking into a dangerous
Rocking-horse sprint at false visions, nevertheless
When we are despairing, drawn it would seem
By deceptions only, working to wean
Our minds from arrival, staring vacantly
At the tormented air, while the enraged sun
Careens in white circles about a sky
The blood-orange of an eyelid, he can with no warning
Lift the furred neck swinging there
Like a winter serpent, flare divining nostrils,
Even from far off smell the true water.