Because I wanted to try a classic method,
I bought some wine.

As I foster my alcoholism,
Edgar Allan Poe
please hold my hand.

You're not aware of this, darling,
but from the open door
I watched your drenching insides.
Water dripping on your arms, on your legs, on your feet
from your hair wrapped in bubbles
of leaking advertisements promising
softness and dandruff free scalp.

The strands were around your fingers,
sterile and making love.

And all those times, darling
while laying in bed
on crumpled sheet, I wonder
if you ever saw the blood of the rabbits in the lab
as the water dripped down the gentle foams of the shampoo
down to your temples -
down to your eyes.

—and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses,
is what I wish to prove.

When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.

Where they died, there the road ended

and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that

the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon

will not be there.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”