I have seen her playing
With light, edging her hair,
In crescents so fair.

I have watched her fingers
Twirl and twine, beaming gold,
Threshing precious hold.

I have witnessed the taming
Of the sun's rays, captured,
Spinning in rapture.

And I feel for the pale moon
Who offers his frail, vestige light,
While she sleeps at night.

Mourning doves at dusk,
Coo, harken what is to come,
Sun falls, new stars break.

I have known the stifling silence of all—
The world's cruel turning, the teasing dawn,
Breaking with fainting days, blinking out
Their dashing hopes, so much for rugs,

Pulled out.  I will not miss the slipping shade
That buried my name in Pharos fallow tomb,
Nor will I lament the times passing, raging,
Spectacle, the fallen masque of my fame.

I shall welcome the majesty of the ******
Loam, the honour of being the daisies mantle
The goodly fortune to sleep under the golden
Stars who birthed my dream of grace and light.

( for Síneánn )

Sound softly hung, she spoke, gave birth to place;
And there, found him closed in, frozen, shivering.
Her dawn light hands gently warmed his face;
His winter room sweetly broke into the spring.
After darkness died he felt strange bonds again;
Birds chimed, flew by, and the walls fell away.
Locked in her arms the turning world grew open;
His eyes nestled in the light her joy had made
And with her temperance swelled his weary eyes;
This was the day of her birth, Venus by the seas
And lonely air was steeping, the ground set aside
His tabled world was now a feral garden green.
In countenance with only grace she lies,
With mere touch turned his ceiling into sky.

He shuffles his muffled way through cardboard aisles,
Oblivious, sheltered, speaking in a mumble of tongues,
His piecemeal truths search for all that is meaningless,
Where he carves a gravestone—arguments in the rows.

.
In a swagger of swirl bones begin,
Bold artist looks back on kept time,
Fierce eyes fencing out from a pen,
So much soul reels unto scrim lines.

1
The chards rising.  Am I the praying bird?
In the gleaming sun my bones are negative,
My flesh a cypher walking through the plains
As ghost I move, my dark lord, above me
Flocks swirl and spike. I stand accused,
Your pointed face divining oblivion,
And no redemption in the rains of my
Cliff walk days.


2
I see my shroud pinning on the wires
His legs are razored forks spinning my
Compass from True North. Your dark brush-
Fire wings, the swept wind, wheels and strings
My fate. Such black rhetoric in a burn,
Your caws, loosed perches, on the stakes, picks
My crowning grave. Black dove, your feathers finger
As they slice.


3
Smoke, the cardinal blood caries my teething
Bone, spades my hand without a flight.
Taut, the pulled noose my hooded one
I see my scarecrow’s reflexion, the scar,
Let blood, the seeded droppings end trailed
To my door. Feathers, ferry to carry on
Dowsing downward, black knight of down, to sticks
On extended wings.

Abjure the bones broken in,
The first lift frissoned by
The moving trees slain on the shift,
Rivers and risen flowers cut,

My statuary lurches betide
The nap of bent wing saluting.

My aviary is a fluttering bed,
The scattered head REMs my flight,
My feet in cloud extend for landings
Tings the belled bound legging.

My falconer bows with pride
In the stall bent wings stooping.

My clawed creature glides for only
The pitching sun or shining moon
And my flights execution, the hooded
Head, end trails my falconer.

My days, fowl to the lunar kite,
Assail the winds open wound.

Sad modern poets,
Kneel to all that's irony—
Worthless as a stunt.

Lovers soon regretted,
Who had words in a dark field,
Black and low as crow.

Outside light is cold,
Sleet sousing naked branches,
Whole world shivering.

When eyes locked he fell
And time set a new fever
Upon the world.  It did not
Help that her voice touched
And moved and tore into
His stone as if water carved
A million years of buried lime
Or that the spheres that sang
Were now sounding discordant,
Confounded as he was, fallen,
Empty as the universe, slight
As the lonely, lost, and unlighted
Seas of the moon.

                              And her hair,
It was not fair, that the endless,
Playful stars could fire even brighter
Below the forgotten heavens.

When love was young and bore an immigrant
Soul, how fresh and adventurous the years
And brinkmanship, my rite, was took for grant,
Aye, in my flotsam and jetsam, I spent no tears
Which by and by a greedy sea of beginnings
Has left no bounty, but cargo delivered or turned
To wood adrift, which built but useless things,
Children love tossing in fires bonny burned.
Here I lie, on the waters edge, searching—
For something to contain my emptiness,
My wanderlust, but like shy waves lurching,
I wrestle now, toward land, not loneliness.
Though I spent my life as a flag unfurled,
A disembodied soul is without this world.