AND THE KEY IS TURNED ON OUR OWN UNCERTAINTY

He still called a starling
a stare.

I watched his voice
as the bird in his words

flitted from Yeats to Shakespeare to
Pliny the Elder before

landing in the Mabinogion.

Outside
in the real world

a starling was
being its

noisy and gregarious
self.

The walls between literature
and the real world

are loosening.

He had fed my heart
on fantasies.

Memory crumbles
back into the earth

I carry from his grave
on my new shoes.

The clock I see
still stands

at twenty past four
as it has done for years.

Your voice comes
and builds

in the empty house
of my heart.

*


The Stare's Nest by My Window

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned.
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war:
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

W.B. Yeats