It was Fr. Sydney McEwan who crowned us with blossoms
\nThat day in Cappoquin, a day I slipped off the vortex of childhood
\nAnd found myself at your feet, you hardly more than thirteen
\nAnd I thirteen and worn down with the weight of my father\u2019s
\nHumanism, his teaching me that there was no worthwhile
\nMessage from Mary, nothing to be had from allegorical woman
\nBut grief and misunderstanding. I would give it all up for this
\nCrown of thorns, love that pressed upon my head as the tannoy
\nSang in its priestly reverberations, its sweet warmth and holy
\nStrength, its flowers of evening in the brilliant green of May \u2013
\nYou passed by as if floating on the warm air of a pure faith,
\nYour spectacularly large eyes the eyes of an angel who must
\nHave come with Mary; the host of Mercy nuns your adoring
\nServants I thought then, hosts who must have only left a
\nGirl so heavenly out of their sight for an hour of prayers. Oh
\nGod who blessed us to live like old Catholics. Oh Mary, His
\nMother, who set you walking; your May outfit blue as heaven.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Your tailor is a disgrace, the way he has let you out
\nInto the world so dishevelled, so lacking in grace.<\/p>\n
Look at those loose-fitting feathers, silks out of place,
\nAnd threads hanging loosely when they should be taut
\nAnd black, not dish-water grey. The hems of your garment<\/p>\n
Are falling down from behind and feathery threads
\nAre an embarrassment of stitches. Lucky for you, bird,<\/p>\n
Without the dinner-jackets of jackdaws, lacking in socks,
\nYour invitations to dinner are in far fields; a third <\/p>\n
Of your food is in roads of muck or on corrugated sheds
\nAnd all your embarrassment is camouflaged in flocks.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The quality of sunlight. I mean the quality of light QUEEN OF THE MAY It was Fr. Sydney McEwan who crowned us with blossoms That day in Cappoquin, a day I slipped off the vortex of childhood And found myself at your feet, you hardly more than thirteen And I thirteen and worn down with the weight of my father\u2019s Humanism, his teaching me that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":96,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[371,372],"tags":[375],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nOn a morning in Iowa when you can\u2019t even remember
\nWhat you had for breakfast or even if you had
\nA breakfast. To float. To be young and to have broken
\nFree. Linden trees float above you in a lacuna
\nThat youth has made just in time, before all of Ireland
\nMight have been lost to your care-worn childhood.
\nCoffee and the scent of cinnamon under pale leaves,
\nThe cinnamon of Iowa City, the coffee-cup
\nReplenished by a boy you still don\u2019t recognise as gay,
\nA sweetheart of a boy who misunderstood a gesture
\nOr a word or your ability to quote C. P. Cavafy
\nAnd all the brittle poems from a sunlit room
\nIn Alexandria. Was Rae Delvin a boy or a girl?
\nHow little you know of her burning, sunlit pages.
\nWhat you are thinking of is a girl with brown eyes
\nIn a lost poem from another language, a poem
\nAs delicate as a small boy with woman\u2019s eyes.
\nYou are now afloat in the long American summer
\nAfter Vietnam when all of the burning issues
\nBecame personal things. The best poets in Marvin
\nBell\u2019s workshop dream of watching for fires in a forest
\nSouth-east of Seattle: they must choose, for career,
\nTo follow Aldo Leopold\u2019s Sand County Almanack<\/em>,
\nBut you must choose a girl or boy fashioned from
\nThe windswept thigh-bone of a deer. It is sunlit
\nBeneath these pales trees in Iowa. It is so far away
\nFrom that Irish world of wars and memoirs, from
\nThat elderly man you knew, wearing a lemon waist-coat
\n And a frayed Guards tie and a scratched tank-watch
\nWith a blue and red canvas strap. I think that man
\nMust have been the youth the elder loved when
\nHe and him were very young. The housekeeper back
\nHome said they were both handsome but inaccessible:
\nI didn\u2019t know then what her tone of voice meant,
\nI mean her own settled and married intonation
\nThat crackled down the line from a damp, tied cottage.
\nA full-size bronze of the god Hermes, a very
\nExpensive purchase from Artemis S.A.
\nOf the protector of merchants in a classical
\nLysippan pose, was all the rage in the household
\nThat summer of \u201978. The sculpture was
\nSomething that defined them both, both who\u2019d parted
\nLong after the housekeeper had been forsaken, and
\nLong before the hope of romance had returned
\nTo Europe. That pause when Al Bowlly went silent,
\nWaiting for all dancers to turn and regroup
\nOn the old vinyl that I\u2019d rescued from among things
\nIn a life he\u2019d once lived, that pause of the Ray Noble Orchestra,
\nSeemed like the muffled \u2018plurp\u2019 of the Chateau
\nLafite<\/em> \u201845 his lover had brought and insisted they open.
\nIn my life there were brilliant new openings:
\nThis promise of sunlight in Iowa, all that cinnamon
\nAnd these coffee cups borne by persons whose names
\nI couldn\u2019t remember even then, but in his long life \u2013
\nEbbing away from me as our Pan-Am Jumbo
\nBanked in a holding pattern over Chicago, in his life
\nIt seemed like the end of one long season
\nIn Mayfair, the end of wine as deep as 20-year old
\nTawny Port; of a deep love known once, of such
\na Cru<\/em>; of such a compote of Cavafy, tannin and art. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"