In the cracked and bleeding winter,
like leaves beneath the lying snow,
I read portents in my father’s
Irish hands.
In
search of the cord
that binds the severed self, holds
hand to wrist and word to tongue,
keeps up the kissing of bone to
bone
and flesh to heart. Keep breath in
me,
when blood itself sings out for
dissolution.
I grow tired of your incense
mutters
and the way you talk so knowingly
of the alchemy of the soul,
preening
psychopomp tracing human destiny
in the palm’s careless
lines.
But I heard delusion in the
hammered
keys, and behold, my eyes are
opened.
On the sidewalk in the bay of
bricks,
I saw forms and images where the
sky
as sullen silver sits on top of
spires
that I have seen and sounded.
Quick,
now, the water-song, when it sweeps
up
into the wind to writhe and spin.
As of old:
cold-crying
summer-slayer,
Sleet-Spitter,
crack crystal—
come
work us to worship.
Not by star-signs and houses of
influence,
but by the word’s own time and
rhythm,
as dust teaches dust what is meant
by
wisdom.
In
the cracked and bleeding winter,
like leaves beneath the lying snow,
I
read portents in my father’s Irish
hands.
