In Defense of St. Patrick

Strange to see the angel here, participate, no mistaking that chill for the almost

intangible application

Of moisture to the transverse cones the jack pines make at regular intervals

Beneath the axis of our genuflection. How easy to mistake diligence for

endeavor, therefore service, the severed hand

In which Titian placed his own end, the pigment; runic, and the disease that

carried him

Beyond mere questions of title. Think about it: when the sun sets

You can lay claim to any shade the mind binds with the libel of color, no one will

stop you, no one

Will question you out past the singular hour when sleep raises its blurred flag,

when even the small factories the needles make

Shut down, rest their tropic cells as far from diminishment as the accumulation

of unrealized kindness is

From charity despite shared motion. One recommends: appointment of an

administrator in due course. His report,

Almost decorous as to statements of value, replevy, accounts current

And the figure of a woman left incomplete except for green cloak flaring. Body of

a child in the parlor, body

Of that which had been Child nacreous, a spectral sheen. God knows all deaths

collude toward a singularity

Through which time extrapolates, Yeats’ gyre no less for pulse-prompt

Or the heart’s metric. Sake: from Old English, dispute, fault, hence a

purpose,

Advantage, real benefit; litigious root. The paronymy we supposed

in fact brute dispossession. On a quiet street

The thief’s mark moves easily through a succession of broad days, whistling,

receiving the poor in his mild manner, paying careful attention to

horticulture but not understanding

How three voices will soon claim that melody. What, could ye not watch with

me;

A touch would have sufficed. Cold flake against forearm. By which we are

known —

And the fields filling now as those woods did with that wonder.