Spring 2015
reconciling Christ with Sophocles
Heading toward what is known in poems and songs by dervishes and troubadours on the gangplank of a
boat about to depart for a city guarded by a tree.
To have kept the fire alive like a shield held up to the sun so as to bounce its rays back into the earth (call
this my Scottish eye)
First there was love then its desolation in an outworn story -yet to forgive oneself –I have not reached it
though the dead continue speaking
Others have gone where I have gone and though no footsteps can be followed I did not fail to believe;
finding a language in language, separating irony from paradox, at which the roots of my hair sizzled,
speaking –but that was later…
Making one mistake, making a second, yet is poetry not a suitable recompense-stirring old fires, holding a
mirror up to the sun, holding a shield?
The pool which polished the stone I hold polishes me to this nakedness and I have nothing else to place
before you
In which if I am Hag I am also Virgin, casting sideway glances at mirrors of water and ink, and all my
memories of Eden re-found
Bright water, bright water -I held to my lover but he held to other than what I was; then cursing him with
an utterance no regret repaired as if the Virgin had bowed to the Hag and the act could not be undone
Undone, undone, the moon will undo me by giving me a hundred months to live and the cup my lover’s
ghost-hand holds out to me tells me death is the true tradition I must pluck a branch from and descend
I tremble at such shadows and such words yet pluck a greening branch to guide me on.
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The Linnet's Wings Poetry