Jaundiced Mary has a clever tongue
Or does she, when snuffling through lettuce stumps?
Here is England and here, a great glass cup:
Now drained and drafty and full of what was.

Wet-lipped Samuel Carpenter, the priest of the first and third
Doesn’t mind the second, they mutter under leaf-umbrellas.
He spreads his limbs,
“Looking like a Kestrel with
That beaky nose – who’s he playing?”
When Sammy calls you for redemption, you just nod, swallowing
The lump that might be your tongue.

I, the great cobwebs on the curtains of the hall
Did sit, and see, and mourn at all -
Sweet napes of boys’ necks, ascending flushes on flesh -
And while I was weaved, I saw the creating.
When he struck down my Maker, I saw them fail.
My brother, the almagest of dust swirling below his robe
Did his wicked dance on their toenails
And, after the wails, on their nice black shoes
That his sister Mary scrubbed clean to draw a glance from God.

But my brother, born of neglect, had no tender scraps
And threw his laughter onto the pulpit.

Shock of fire on the stairs,
Peter nimbling his way to the altar with a wincing grin,
His limbs lacking and thin.
But O, boy – on the dangerous precipice of
Youth and the tremulous self-birth.

He was waiting to be shattered. To find some nice thick girl to glue glass
with her heavy moans.
She has not arrived.
But he totes around the feeling of his empty bones in a leaky leather sack.
The cross of ashes invisible, but ever staining his forehead -

Which now wrinkles at tax returns.
He squints his eyes in cobble-stones
Weeping for the greatness of small places.
Instead he knows not but tightness,
And against the new masonry he re-erected the old rampart of bones.

In his youth, he scowled at me, but I saw:
The vesicles yearning, the arteries plugged up with love.
For God, and for Good, and for my weavers, so he let us be.

Let us hold prayers for that which never looked like living
(So my Sebastian said with a snifter and a stale smile)
And if it was rushed to an early death, then we do know who to blame.

(If I could bind up my boy in tearaway tires,
And help preserve the Youth one so admires.)

With a prick of my veins he would wake
And re-realize. Every day, anon and anon
Like my Anna, he would declare
That purity means nothing, easily distracted are we
From the tools and tricks of our trade. You’re like England, I would say:
The wildness has gone out of you.

Once Mary whistled in the dark, oh what fun, boys!
While all the while I felt screaming through the solitude.
Trying to shatter silence without speech.

They put her in a veil! They tore her hair rather than see it grow.
Sweet Thessaly, restore yourself –
But when the walls of the convent open, I pray they are not there.