If I were to become again
Your dove, in all its tenderness,
Your star in the holding sky,
Would we never know once more
The miracle of flight, of white
lsled lands, undiscovered, burgeoning,
And green, the rainbow sparkled peaks,
The oceanic, new sights of the eye?

In my darkest hour, by the rage of sun,
I met her in a shower of April days,
Riding to the moon in twined études,
The dry chrysalis of winter shells
Gave way to lightness, glaze,
The rain in our eyes, amaze,
Her voice as it fluted, broke,
Like feathers from a wandering bird,
Were my wings of iridescence and joy
And we were blind when we were born,
We were blind as bells of floating grace,
Lived forever by such a new shore,
Such ends of buzzing time,
As May flies.

Our perfect kiss—
Lost in autumns lonely winds,
  .  .  .  Single leaf falling.

Do you remember me?
I am fed up, strung on night
And closed in by time.
When I dine with dearest
Friends there is always a place
Set for you, there is always
A story, untold to them,
But not for strangers
Who know even without saying
What you never said to me.
My eyes are cracked dams
Above the flood plains,
My heart is dented brass,
Bent, out of gear and turns,
Mournful, dried, pocked
As rust, tarnished red,
Petrified.
If I look at the diamond moon
I am hooked.
When the flower brushes my calves
The lifting scent caresses, teases,
Rising with my memory of fire and stone.
If I travel to the balm Paris
Of the southern hemisphere
La Belle Époque is wearing your
Dress, the pampas fires and undulates
Like your hair, the Polaris star
Points at me, dreaming
Of you, dreaming,
My jewel, my,
Little moon.

You are as close as I will ever come to love.
              
                                         (Yet you are still

                                                          so far away
                                                          that even if I ran around
                                                          the mountain of mistakes
                                                          growing quietly
                                                          between our bodies
                                                          my regrets would reach you
                              
                                                                                                      before I did.)

One lash from her eye—
Lovely, cruel voice binding me,
  .  .  .  Exquisite torment.

It is over now.
I bow my head as you leave,
Rain fills your footprints.

I came to a courtyard of my own making,
To a cottage by the sea at the worlds edge.
I furnished it with my left over life, complete,
Barren and colorless and I wrote the newest
Book of psalms out of tinder and flame, a tome
Of grey and useless poems, unheard of songs
And reams of flesh.  There in the lightest dark,
By the Druid stone that was placed just for me,
I planted a creeping yew tree.  And the moon
Sang in celebration and silence like a fallen
Priest.  
                    Under the covering hazel trees,
That sprung to life after the longest winter,
Which taught me to forget my name, I now
Struggle with light and my body, warring, torn
Is fading slow, like the always arriving, down
Turning solstice, the climates of the mind,
Where it is digging the never ending shallow
Hole only the spreading eternal yew, that I
Planted, will ever know and only the Lazarus
Moon shall ever rise above.

I came to a courtyard of my own making,
Was it dream that led me there or my eyes?

I waited for her  .  .  .
With all the years of my youth,
Heart still locked outside.

And dreaming of Inisfáil, I was raised on Bolivar Pond.
Sheltered in my wake, I’d coo as the dewy’d morning dove
   And fern in my bed, I rose to greet
       The song-splayed sounds of light
   And work, I made it dropping slow
Bright in the summers swoon, I was adorned in forest eves
By rings that rang from tree to rook, and flung the wingèd down,
       Brambled in bay, garland in violet
   When blades could ***** and not make bleed,

And I was brindled by the moon’d many shades, that liken
To a brook, and mottled in my main, noted among moss
   In that glow, once knighted we must serve
       Wood, let me comb in peace!
Colored in the mantled cloth of leaves
And bonny and red, I was the brave and the boon, the deer-
Ants learned me, and herons stood muck, on stands spearing all mite
       And the vernal song sang lowly
   Swaddled in azure’s unfolding dream.

At each turn was a season, nascent life charming in marsh
Forays that brimmed the hollow rood, in clover yards, I saw
   The lilt of bees, sallied in clearings
       Brown as the yellowed beech
   Colored in sounds that beat the heart.
And forth into the field I sprang unto that shedded loam
And high was the sail that bellowed the raft that raked my pond,
       Bullied by the har-umph of frogs
   I rippled, rowing cat o’nine tailed tunes.

Windy and free in the hollowed bark round the ****** bay
I trailed the bear sniffing ****, heard the hoo of a swooping vowel
   And wild in hare, dug the fox-hole up!
       Damp fires hailed the rising
   Moon, as fire-flies dinted the troutling pools
And nothing I saw in my drowning sun could nettle or thorn
My piney ways, nothing could rot my wood-craving ears
       For the kestrel’s qweet-a-quee rang holy
   In the skunk-flowered fields of Bolivar Pond.

So many words between us—
The caustic breech of abatement, ruin
Runs atonal, in recitals of indifference,
How even the ****** birds now sound
Discordant and rain crushes as it falls,
Ballistic.

The pinprick stars are merely eyes
Undraped to the worn soul's veil
And gorgon time roils setting our feet
In the crust of wishes and delusions
Kept.  

The bullet riddled skies in absence
Of colour are but particulates of lime
To the moonless night.  Words have no
Eyes, they can only finger.

O the sorrows of the untouched—
The cruelty of the sightless and bent blind,
Drab vermillion stars felled like forced tears.