(For Sheila)
Light contracts
in shorten-
ing days,
a blue moon is rising and you are tearing up
inside.
Roiling in your mind all the poems, made and un-
made
like a strewn bed, sheets rumpled, rancid from too much love.
The winnowing of memories that flood the brain,
make of you a time traveller, an argonaut
travelling back through steep
steps
of air
to Sandymount and the drift of sea,
your father taking you to the opera.
All your siblings set sail for Canada.
Solid earth gone from under-
foot
this is not that country
it is all sea and sky from now on.
Your windows over-
look St. Stephen‘s Green,
two storeys up your eye-line is level
with ruined light pooling in the tops of trees
whose leaves by burning leaf
drop
unfastened from their branches
inaudible to our ears as the cry of the soprano pipistrelle
(maybe in this Chora or space you can hear their cacophony),
as whorls of words unspool and the blade of new moon
is clasped in the cradle of the old.
This November two moons are rising
like sunstruck sirens causing tumult and
turbulence
and high above cumulus clouds
e x p a n d i n g,
their puffed up fluid whiteness climbing
the sky
and every night without exception
indifferent stars are pulsing everywhere.