Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!
Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways:
Cuchulain battling with the bitter tide;
The Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed,
Who cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold;
And thine own sadness, whereof stars, grown old
In dancing silver-sandalled on the sea,
Sing in their high and lonely melody.
I
Swear by what the Sages spoke
Round the Mareotic Lake
That the Witch of Atlas knew,
Spoke and set the cocks a-crow.
Swear by those horsemen, by those women,
Complexion and form prove superhuman,
That pale, long visaged company
That airs an immortality
Completeness of their passions won;
Now they ride the wintry dawn
Where Ben Bulben sets the scene.
I can no longer blush. Half-face towards the starchy scape.
Birds limn the spindle trees, their Listerine-hued eyes dart
as they trill mechanical dirges tabulating not again, not
again / I can no longer blush. The flat arctic sky
boundlessly jogs to another hemisphere / She grows!
Or her pectoral grows or all her pectorals grow / A drop of body
oil the size of a water balloon splooshes down on a man as a graceless
anointing, atomizing into tears / How delicate the sounds are from
Overheard in the heat, the air, the fruit fly’ s drone
of the perfect helix, overheard in science’ s repartee
of right and wrong, in the gossip of perfumed women
basking in London’ s charmless sun,
Overheard in the gasps of penny sideshows, the formulas
of doctors summing up freaks in taxidermic clinics,
Overheard in the echo of cubic hallways,
in the speculum’ s wand first tested on the slave woman,
Overheard in history’ s senile tympanum
was a Song.
REVERSALS
There are graves under the houses and houses
under the graves and linking the three
a broad stone staircase where the dead
go up and the living go down. They pass one another
wordlessly which might mean they don’ t know, or else
they’ re pretending not to know. You can smell
the orange grove on the hill; you can hear
children bowling barrel hoops down the street.
Two women gossip as they fill their jug at the spring.
Their secrets cloud the water.
APPROACH LIFE AS IF IT WERE A BANQUET
Your rightful portion averts your ireful potion:
Caress what can’ t be blessed, cup shadows under breasts.
Let pass what’ s out of ken: lover, job, riches,
a ripe peach
until it reaches you.
Bring salt for your honey, lime for your grenadine.
Money’ s not your fault.
You’ re a feathered peahen
preening for marzipan men.
Staring up into the tank's belly lit
by a bare bulb hanging down off
the exhaust, a mechanic's hands are up
inside the dark metallic innards doing something
that looks personal, private. This tank is nothing
like the ones the Americans deploy.
Those have uranium piercing shells that could melt
right through this tank's armor and set off
the ammo box: nothing can withstand the American tanks.
But where, oh where is the holy idiot,
truth teller and soothsayer, familiar
of spirits, rat eater, unhouseled wanderer
whose garble and babble fill rich and poor,
homeless and housed, with awe and fear?
Is he hiding in the pit of the walkie-talkie,
its grid of holes insatiably hungry,
almost like a baby, sucking in the police sergeant's
quiet voice as he calls in reinforcements?
Oh holy idiot, is that you sniffing the wind
for the warm turd smell on the mounted policemen
backing their horses' quivering, skittish
What came wafting
down the ditch
by the marsh grass waving
opened a hole
in the day through which,
like a puff of breath,
a ghost fountained up
rising in soft slo-mo,
lost, desolate, no place
left to go.
Dear bloody
Beirut and its internet cafes
were still smoking
from last night's
"little bombing."
Looking at the lion behind the plate glass
I wasn’ t sure what I was looking at: a lion, OK,
but he seemed to come apart, not literally
I mean, but I couldn’ t see him whole:
Mane. Teeth. The slung belly pumping
as he panted and began to roar. His balls
sheathed in fur swaying a little. His tail’ s tuft
jerking in an arc like an old-time pump handle
rusted in midair. Somebody or something
