Gaelic
10.27.06

She concaved among the winded histories
of our own firework-glory, short and shattered,
a dated memoriam to the gutter cadence
unknown to the world’s swept streets
and stole such a brief relief
from apple pie.

Perhaps that’s why she slipped
the wild flowers, brownly trodden,
in among foxglove America,
and accented her anger
with the arrowed brogue.

An anachronism grows and ricochets
within her, where detonation
is fibrous as muscle
and heedless as heart.

Here on these higher shores
her homeland cannot hear its name
but she remembers still,
swilling her words from the language
of bloody ballads, earnest wakes.