They were each other's fantasy in youth.
No splintering at all about that mouth
when they were flesh and muscle, woman and man,
fire and kindling. See that silk divan?
Enough said . Now the times themselves
are his asylum: these are the Middle Ages, sweet
and savage era of the saving grace; indulgences
are two a penny; under the stonesmith's hand
stone turns into lace . I need his hand now .
Outside my window October soaks the stone;
you can hear it; you'd almost think
the brick was drinking it; the rowan drips
and history waits . Let it wait. I want
no elsewheres: the clover-smelling, stove-warm
air of Autumn catches cold; the year turns;
the leaves fall; the poem hesitates:
If we could see ourselves, not as we do-
in mirrors , self-deceptions, self-regardings–
but as we ought to be and as we have been:
poets, lute-stringers , makyres and abettors
of our necessary art, soothsayers of the ailment
and disease of our times, sweet singers,
truth tellers, intercessors for self-knowledge–
what would we think of these fin-de-siecle
half-hearted penitents we have become
at the sick-bed of the century: hand-wringing
elegists with an ill-concealed greed
for the inheritance?
My prince, demented
in a crystal past, a lost France, I elect you emblem
and ancestor of our lyric: it fits you like a glove-
