1.
...But then, Holbein, Hols, and Solly Metrocloke, and those impelled to closer kingship o’er that beastly field, and toil-breathing walkers who obtruded upon shades, and the puddle beside; Pollexfen, the famed Desk Rebel; his conscripts, the famed Drumcondra Irregulars; their personal radii all gone awry by the agency of roaring shot. Fragments of the unrelenters, in ashen splinters—spidery sunlight with fingers, to paw in the combing clouds; again, the doglegged jag of new waste; heap, thatch in brisk or notched clots, and the flatware in curls; coopery, burst; jugs, now discontended and splittered; all oaken things, and powdery creatures alike are snapped.
2.
With this charge, organs removed
to another point. Derelicting all stiff,
and strummed instead in the wind of opened space,
entered into a freer play, and free to
digest what passes by. Any next rigid
old disjects nearby themselves are freer with time—
the marrow slides out with a sound, and flies.
3.
Prints on the scene replenish to level;
‘plenished with wellings, and ‘plenished
with soapish rain.
Warped plain of exodus, spaded to balkworthy
riding by that slough, stumped into hash
by the trudging; foothills with
no shaped leg to lead to; the hollows
‘plete all to a neat solemn level.
There’s nothing to help it!
Dun without hill and prospect,
do with it.
4.
Redeemers will carry a pack of long leaves here,
and twine them with stakes to the surface, for sheets;
they will have to chop oak-trees from big blocks
of wood, and stake them with strokes to the
planned extent; will have to twine
tailfeathers to the limbs, as bait
for pugnacious birds:
when birds forget their quarrel,
birds stay to roost.
-2005
