Parnassus
©Sean Farragher

Olympus began at the sour notes of childhood
where the flat daffodils and poison ivy
rust orange in the double leaves of terror.
How we fall waiting for darker Eros to settle in sprays
of bachelor-buttons spread on my mother’s grave.

Greece rained as dark summers in a fields of blood
when Axis and Nazi rained in the text of Sumerians
written in cuneiform on mud and straw now by America.

All poems begin in the flight of that war
of self and soul that Yeats made the
bounty of his last years in Sligo churchyard.

We are that war today, again, like ribald repeats
that are not funny and waste intention.

Why is the passage of oil or the destruction
of skyscrapers more important than childhood?

How can we say there is nothing to do
Lately, I lament zero as I bleach in depression
or rest in the motion of daylight with blue
clouds that are shifting gray at the edges.

Will I remember the end of the tempest as
mountain steps, 9570 feet of them,
stumbling in a dream in Greece, where
Parnassus, a lovely place for lovely gods

Climb faster, rest no more, hear
every word for it may not last
or they will rust in the creek strained
as volcanoes long dead revive.
Yes, no answers in mud and straw;
none in the click of keys as we speed
tuning forks that raise harmony too high.
Let dissonance live as we climb.