Sarah
For Esther Simms
(summer 1972)

Esther clings with Sarah.
Her laughter paints the wheat,
the straw, the maple leaf.
Esther, silk woman, romps
with back in straw;
Her Sarah nurses ambrosia,
frankincense, myrrh
Silk and child cleave
her sweat and milk stick
roll past my lips, drops
upon our thighs and feet--
Sarah with the rose petal shirt
her manger: arms and delicate fingers
Esther rides upon the sea;
a wicker raft with myrtle oars--
maize and cornhusks twist
in her black hair.
Esther's skin brushes mine--
I tease her grin, ears and marrow
with Yeats' borrowed pen

This child we smile upon
as our fingers peel a marigold
with a broken stem.
This infant crawls to me with
a purple string in her teeth.
Sarah draws her whims in air.
Her tangled, unsure hands reach
towards the soldiers on the altar
with Cromwell, with James,
second Catholic King
Sarah, brush the rain from roof.
Shoot the wheat across our cheeks.
Laugh, Esther, run out there
run run our souls whip all souls
towards the Magi;
golden violent varnish.
Esther held her Sarah again, mixed
with musk and rainbow meat, blended
foxglove, mussels, prawns
with the blood hands on the beach
On the road to Xanadu, on the Boyne,
Loughs, Shannon, we leak, we reek
of all the bitter verse that rolls
in song, in soldier song
As we lift the mantle from the altar
an infant with a towel for bib and wink
appears with God on a pewter sink
Later, after Sarah sneezed--
All the lollipops made red--
red and red, black flags, green,
orange baste the dead with verse
and British tea
"Open child eyes so tight, relax
with cathedrals for swelt night.
Old men crouched with summer Gaels.
Abandon each for Anglochauns, elves,
and English wool"

With a plaid shawl Esther walks
on St. Stephen’s Green. Our coats
thrown here and there. . . Oral
shadow caught the child's feet; it
flung her wide, outside the briar patch,
near the fox, into the feathers,
and a secret box
Sarah, we sail the Loughs far from here,
far from the Boyne, the dust and braids.
At the rest we made with four lugs
we gallop across the bogs to Coole;
we salute the Erin sun, four blue eyes.
We beat breath, explode in birth, shank
and shake, shout
“My quacking Savior, my Lord,
I am not sword…”
At Drumcliff, near Tara, Kells,
and salmon weir, we launch our ship upon
the sand--timbers cut the sperm with child
We mark Yeats' simple grave; we turn
our eyes to black-gray sun. Rise our arms,
bless child Sarah, Abraham's wife, sister;
Esther's gentile daughter; Isaac's milk, wheat
All this blends the Strand with Dublin's hums,
with the bees and zany nests, with the Dail,
the comets from my Seventh Henry's pockets.
Later, much later, after the feast
two Siamese nuns, back to back,
drag out the trash, cut the suns
into almond yawns, pain the green
stripe down our streets.




xxxx