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(Double Portrait in a Mirror) I To the meeting despair of eyes in the street, offer Your eyes on plates and your liver on skewers of pity. When the Jericho sky is heaped with clouds which the sun Trumpets above, respond to Apocalypse With a headache. In spirit follow The young men to the war, up Everest. Be shot. For the uncreating chaos Claims you in marriage: though a man, you were ever a bride. Ever among the supple surface of summer-brown muscle The fountaining evening chatter under the stars, The student who chucks back his forelock in front of a glass, You only longed for your longing to last. The engine in you, anxiety, Is a grave lecher, a globe-trotter, one With moods of straw, the winds that blow him, aeroplanes. 'Whatever happens, I shall never be alone, I shall always have a fare, an affair, or a revolution.' II I am so close to you I will confess to you I am all that you do. In thoughts where pity is the same as cruelty Your life is mine. Whether What fears and falters is myself Or yourself — all The apprehension of this time, We are both one. At night I'm flooded by the future Incoming tide of the unharnessed war. Beyond the blacked-out windows of our nightmare Facts race their hundred miles an hour In iron circles on an iron plain. The riders of those race-cars lose All sense of where they are. Ridden by their speed, the men Are their machines. III All I can foresee now — more I shall learn — Is that our fear creates its opposite. Our peace is war. When you choose a mirror for a lover It shows you your own image as a gunman. You are a ghost amid the flares of shellfire Less living than The last war dead whose veins of mineral We mine for here. IV Shall I ever reach The field enclosed by stones In the high mountains Where the scytheless wind Flushes the swayed grasses? Where clouds without rain Add to the sun Their mirroring shine? The simple machinery is here Clear room clear day clear desk And the hand with its power To make the heart pour Into the word, as the sun Moves upward through the corn. Meanwhile, where nothing's sacred And love no longer willed Nor our true purpose conscious, Holy is lucidity And the mind that dare explain.

This is a paean to relief and ecstasy. A man's poem of course—the electric ah! in the long stream arcing a rainbow under the spotlight moon, a covenant between mv body and the earth's. I think of Li Po smiling silently on Green Mountain and can hear Rumi drunk on rapture—drink my brother he calls to me, think of the elephant loosening a great ebullient stream that floats a river past your house and drop turds so immense you could build a hut from them along the shore to shelter your children. What release! Think of your child pedaling under your hand and of a sudden—it just happens—you let go and he's off on his own, free for that first time— the achieve of, the mastery of the child. See the stalwart trees in their silence the stones resting in the driveway, the cat curled asleep on the front porch, the smear of blood on the lion's mouth sitting over his fresh gazelle the morning paper and its stories shouting for attention. The plenitude of it all. And perhaps somewhere a friend is dreaming of me, or someone a stranger is peeing ecstatic under the same moon. A covenant then between us. True or not. It is no matter.

For Andrew O’Hagan Three moons in the sky the night they found him drowned in Sawtan’s Bog; just his cap, sitting there and his wee fat hands poking out. It was no loss to the village, I told them next morning, and the villagers agreed. Horn-daft, he was, havering and glaikit and scaring the children. I mind that time he picked up a mouse and ate it, quick, in two mouthfuls; set the tail aside on the ground like a cocktail stick. I used her well, after that, his Jennie, still in her widow’s weeds, gilping into her whenever I could, in the barn or the boathouse or off in the fields. She slipped two or three out at least, and sank each one in a lobster creel. Her head was away by the end, as mad as her man and no good to me. She sleeps now under Beinn Ruadhainn, her face covered in ivy, scab, and sticky-willow. The dreams came then. Last night, the burning loch, so full of bairns they bobbed to the surface with their hair on fire; black snow; fingers coming through the floorboards; rain like razor blades; the foosty-faced man, there at every corner, hands furred with grey-mould. And her, as always, star-naked, hatching in the herring-nets. The last I remember was my body being driven with sticks through the town to Sawtan’s Brae, and hanged. I broke from sleep and sat up sweating, dream-fleyed in the dark. I groped around for the matches and the matches were put in my hand.

I Swear by what the Sages spoke Round the Mareotic Lake That the Witch of Atlas knew, Spoke and set the cocks a-crow. Swear by those horsemen, by those women, Complexion and form prove superhuman, That pale, long visaged company That airs an immortality Completeness of their passions won; Now they ride the wintry dawn Where Ben Bulben sets the scene. Here's the gist of what they mean. II Many times man lives and dies Between his two eternities, That of race and that of soul, And ancient Ireland knew it all. Whether man dies in his bed Or the rifle knocks him dead, A brief parting from those dear Is the worst man has to fear. Though grave-diggers' toil is long, Sharp their spades, their muscle strong, They but thrust their buried men Back in the human mind again. III You that Mitchel's prayer have heard `Send war in our time, O Lord!' Know that when all words are said And a man is fighting mad, Something drops from eyes long blind He completes his partial mind, For an instant stands at ease, Laughs aloud, his heart at peace, Even the wisest man grows tense With some sort of violence Before he can accomplish fate Know his work or choose his mate. IV Poet and sculptor do the work Nor let the modish painter shirk What his great forefathers did, Bring the soul of man to God, Make him fill the cradles right. Measurement began our might: Forms a stark Egyptian thought, Forms that gentler Phidias wrought. Michael Angelo left a proof On the Sistine Chapel roof, Where but half-awakened Adam Can disturb globe-trotting Madam Till her bowels are in heat, Proof that there's a purpose set Before the secret working mind: Profane perfection of mankind. Quattrocento put in paint, On backgrounds for a God or Saint, Gardens where a soul's at ease; Where everything that meets the eye Flowers and grass and cloudless sky Resemble forms that are, or seem When sleepers wake and yet still dream, And when it's vanished still declare, With only bed and bedstead there, That Heavens had opened. Gyres run on; When that greater dream had gone Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude Prepared a rest for the people of God, Palmer's phrase, but after that Confusion fell upon our thought. V Irish poets learn your trade Sing whatever is well made, Scorn the sort now growing up All out of shape from toe to top, Their unremembering hearts and heads Base-born products of base beds. Sing the peasantry, and then Hard-riding country gentlemen, The holiness of monks, and after Porter-drinkers' randy laughter; Sing the lords and ladies gay That were beaten into the clay Through seven heroic centuries; Cast your mind on other days That we in coming days may be Still the indomitable Irishry. VI Under bare Ben Bulben's head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid, An ancestor was rector there Long years ago; a church stands near, By the road an ancient Cross. No marble, no conventional phrase, On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!

The sleep of this night deepens because I have walked coatless from the house carrying the white envelope. All night it will say one name in its little tin house by the roadside. I have raised the metal flag so its shadow under the roadlamp leaves an imprint on the rain-heavy bushes. Now I will walk back thinking of the few lights still on in the town a mile away. In the yellowed light of a kitchen the millworker has finished his coffee, his wife has laid out the white slices of bread on the counter. Now while the bed they have left is still warm, I will think of you, you who are so far away you have caused me to look up at the stars. Tonight they have not moved from childhood, those games played after dark. Again I walk into the wet grass toward the starry voices. Again, I am the found one, intimate, returned by all I touch on the way.

At times they will fly under. The dome contains jungles. Invent a sky under the dome. Creatures awake, asleep, at play, aglow: they float – unbottled genii – under the dome. Southern Belle, a splash of black, dusted with gold, dissembles,assembling, acts shy under the dome. Cattleheart, Giant Swallowtail, Clipper: sail, navigate sky high under the dome. Like confetti – a wedding – bits of Rice Paper: sheer mimicry under the dome. Magnificent Owl, in air, a pansy, it feeds, wings up, eye to eye, under the dome. Name them: Monarch, then Queen, last Viceroy. What will scientists deify under the dome? Basking against a leaf: a Banded Orange, displayed like a bowtie under the dome. A living museum. Exist to be observed: never migrate, but live, then die, under the dome. Lips, lashes, eyes. From outside in, do beings magnify under the dome? Lepidoptera. From the Greek:Scale-wing. Chrysalis. Stay, butterfly, under the dome.

Under the edge of february in hawk of a throat hidden by ravines of sweet oil by temples of switchblades beautiful in its sound of fertility beautiful in its turban of funeral crepe beautiful in its camouflage of grief in its solitude of bruises in its arson of alert Who will enter its beautiful calligraphy of blood Its beautiful mask of fish net mask of hubcaps mask of ice picks mask of watermelon rinds mask of umbilical cords changing into a mask of rubber bands Who will enter this beautiful beautiful mask of punctured bladders moving with a mask of chapsticks Compound of Hearts   Compound of Hearts Where is the lucky number for this shy love this top-heavy beauty bathed with charcoal water self-conscious against a mosaic of broken bottles broken locks   broken pipes   broken bloods of broken spirits broken through like broken promises Landlords  Junkies  Thieves enthroning themselves in you they burn up couches they burn down houses and infuse themselves against memory every thought a pavement of old belts every performance a ceremonial pickup how many more orphans  how many more neglected shrines how many stolen feet stolen fingers stolen watchbands of death in you how many times Harlem hidden by ravines of sweet oil by temples of switchblades beautiful in your sound of fertility beautiful in your turban of funeral crepe beautiful in your camouflage of grief in your solitude of bruises in your arson of alert beautiful

Under the evening moon the snail is stripped to the waist.

for José Eulogio Garrido Like priestly imprisoned poets, the poplars of blood have fallen asleep. On the hills, the flocks of Bethlehem chew arias of grass at sunset. The ancient shepherd, who shivers at the last martyrdoms of light, in his Easter eyes has caught a purebred flock of stars. Formed in orphanhood, he goes down with rumors of burial to the praying field, and the sheep bells are seasoned with shadow. It survives, the blue warped in iron, and on it, pupils shrouded, a dog etches its pastoral howl.

We have all seen them circling pastures, have looked up from the mouth of a barn, a pine clearing, the fences of our own backyards, and have stood amazed by the one slow wing beat, the endless dihedral drift. But I had never seen so many so close, hundreds, every limb of the dead oak feathered black, and I cut the engine, let the river grab the jon boat and pull it toward the tree. The black leaves shined, the pink fruit blossomed red, ugly as a human heart. Then, as I passed under their dream, I saw for the first time its soft countenance, the raw fleshy jowls wrinkled and generous, like the faces of the very old who have grown to empathize with everything. And I drifted away from them, slow, on the pull of the river, reluctant, looking back at their roost, calling them what I'd never called them, what they are, those dwarfed transfiguring angels, who flock to the side of the poisoned fox, the mud turtle crushed on the shoulder of the road, who pray over the leaf-graves of the anonymous lost, with mercy enough to consume us all and give us wings.