Deep in the Old Forest

where the road twists beneath the ancient trees,

in the tunnel beneath the overarching limbs:

you know it, or you will,

I came again to that twilit place where the way splits

and the three paths, the one short and the two long,

fan out through the Wood

 

And though no road leads from the Forest,

the short one runs swiftly to its end down by the brook

that slides among ferns and the heavy-knuckled roots of the willows,

that stream that mumbles in the night, saying Cold, saying Dark:

you know it, or you will,

that brook with the mist smoking up between its shadowed banks,

where in a den dug back into the soft earth,

amid a litter of rabbit bones, the stoat

licks blood and gristle from its paw

 

And though no road escapes from the Forest,

of the two long paths

the one is strangled with nettles and cruel with stones,

and leads past those dismal thickets tenanted by wasps,

but the other goes soft and mossy through dim glades.

Yet both come down to the stream at last:

you know that, or you will

 

And so I came to that clearing

carpeted with mushrooms and with violets,

to the huge oak stump draped with white linen:

you know it, or you will,

where the three decks of cards are spread,

plaques of horn, plaques of yew, plaques of iron,

each card carved or hammered thin as foil,

intricate of scene, sinuous of marking

 

There I fronted across the board

the god with the one hand of flesh and the other of silver,

with his white and beautiful face, his ruddy curls:

you know him, or you will; and there I implored him

to grant me three new cards, and there

he stood up on one leg and he closed one eye

and with that one hand gleaming and clicking

began to deal

 

I was the year waiting for the first to show,

so slowly did those glittering clever-jointed fingers

turn up the card,

and though I could not yet see what it was, I saw

it was not the short road down to the brook,

and my heart rose up, and there I waited through that long hour

for the dealing out of the remainder, waited to see

my fate laid out on white linen,

waited with my soul bound in that triple cable

that is woven from a strand of rage,

a strand of hope, a strand of fear. You know it,

or you will