To Anna Quinn (1)

I'll make a song for you - 
That should it be
That you return no more to me
In this song I may look and see
You smiling in at me - 
You winking in at me

And I can trace the line
Curving divine
From your neck to heel
And feel
Your sympathy of heart
Upon my tragic art.

Vaguely unenterprizing floating in
A firmament where stars do not change
Through frosty atmosphere or rain.

The old mare
Twenty seven years old
Died: we buried her where
The brown turf-mould
Free from stones
Presses little
On her sapless bones - 
Bones glass brittle.

O lady of the lonely and unloved
You are unmoved
By the lean anguish of a poets cry
You have heard so many greater than I

You I have long known
In tree and stone
And in all sealed tongues
Of sympathy.

I will make you remember me:
O vain egoist!
Nothing remembers
But the part that is kissed
And mystic love
Is their lot where love missed
O none will remember you
Whom you haven't kissed.

There are lilacs in the city
I saw them looking over
Black walls like pretty
Nuns of an enclosed Order
Curious to know
How the earth-wheels go.

You have posessed [sic] me, distressed me in my nine mood muses
I walk around the jail parade-ring till your third-degree bruises
Are a bloody net about my loins.

Everything I look at I make
A mirror of
Wherein to see my soul in all its seasons.

O Monaghan hills
You have made me the sort of man I am
A fellow who can never care a damn
For Everest thrills

The country of my mind
Has a hundred little heads
On none of which foot-room for genius.

Stranger:   What kind your people are
                  I would wish to know - 
                  Round-shouldered men like rolling-stock?