1417

1416

So human,

You are hungry but cannot eat.

You are heavy with the sidewalk, the trees,

Overtopped with this impenetrable.

The sun at night prevents sleep,

It presses your eyelids, you think: red shutters.

You speak a private code,

The others turn away.

The words you recognize,

The sense has slipped elsewhere.

What was lifted floats away

Into a sky you thought was blue long ago.

1415

1414

1413

1412

1411

Desire seems horizoned small

In the manifold of hours,

As minute a resident in such a place

As the lips upon your face.

When two dimensions intersect

The stronger bends the way

The magnetic curl a sunny wind

Compulsion skew a day.

But your person is become a point

In potential's plastic scope

Mere pucker in a canted field

Hedged by a weary trope.

1410

1409

1408

1407

1406

1405

1404

1403

1402

1401

What sanctity is not hollow

That is not a stone to itself,

Without self-sense?

What tolls within the city square

Without an hour's intent,

But an ear that hears no summons?

What hangs upon a wall

Unparented by art,

But a hand to blankness by compulsion bent?

The many blind have consecration;

The one unseen, consummation.

1400

1399

1398

1397

1396

1395

1394

1393
Seeking not a breath but all airs
I am blind to what's before me.
Book, not page,
Makes a moment nought,
And your face a blur
For telling how you fit.
A shadow-world stays my waking eye,
Mere objects and hours
Are between what it would hold;
Yet itself is what it sees,
Unsized upon a sizeless stage.

1392

1391

1390

1389

1388

1387

1386

Daughter of a son of Ireland

If earth be sonned

As spectral as a perambulating Bloom

Though unlettered as the rain

Till parish note another sinner.

Son of a daughter of exile's house

If earth itself exile

Chaste in conflagration

Seared by years

Beyond a fable's solace.

Son of no one

Daughter of herself

Earth they have that never had them

The stones cast single shadows.

1385

1384

1383

1382

1381

1380

1379

Death has no being to she who dies,

But a mass of bronze to the breathing,

That the last exhale in a quiet room

Lies over the sunlit day

With a metal weight,

Its daily business sudden-false,

Mis-scaled to a purpose

That was small a breath before.

1378

1377

1376

1375

1374

1373

1372

In medias res is human

As time and action's

By thought and hapless volition born,

By hazard breathed.

At what point is a tale if

A leaf fall and re-direct the eye?

A cry in the street summon memory?

1371

1370

1369

There is a perfect quality in the cricket's voice

That grammars a late summer's city to country manner

With trilled points and stops,

Commas to part and render

A hubcap, arthropod, urbantree's

Thrum as a season's hour,

A paragraph of sound.

1368