Giant loaf of Irish soda bread
On a heavy platter, bless these hands
Passing you around the table. Let
Us not falter before we have had
Our desert: a taste that is of sweet
Plenty overpouring fullness that
Fills the empty glasses of our need.
Here, you say, there always will be more
Than enough left over. Take and eat.
If it were not blasphemous one could well
Imagine Him enthroned beneath it on
A matching bronze cast seat, acanthus leaves
Repeating in between the volutes of
The twice man sized Solomonic column
Supporting each armrest, His feet propped on
An Ottoman, receiving haughty prayers
From parishioners and ignoring the
Hum of tourists bumbling toward their
Next museum as quietly as bees.
after Marianne Moore
The muskrat,
“having all the best qualities
of the beaver but with
infinitely more charm”,
swims from bank
to bank of
likely water sources in search
for the best burrow place
he can provide his wife,
propelled by
webbed feet and
directed by the flattened scale–
bound rudder of his tail
which extends half his length.
The muskrat,
eager pro–
creator, is monogamous,
defends his family
by small underwater
entrances
into their
hovel, like the pangolin saves
his long claws for digging.
Like the pangolin he
seals his ears:
he against
the waters which he swims beneath
nearly twenty minutes
not needing new air, nor
noticed by
expectant
wake-watchful coyotes. “A sail–
boat was the first machine”,
invented when a mast
and canvas
were propped up
perpendicular to a raft
too long adrift. The musk–
rat is content to feed
from floating
platforms he
constructs without direction, like
his pushup hut when he
must build it above ground,
from offshoots
of the same
green stuff he eats. This Catholic fish
succeeds where many breeds
cannnot, protected from
sulfurous
waters by
a stubbornness which he mistakes
for grace, pursued, evades
his predators by his
industry.
Architect
and contractor, designer, he
receives the spring deluge
with equanimity
and prepares
to build a–
new. From wetland floor or shallow
streambed he brings up mud
with which he will refound
his house: mud
in which he
leaves the temporary pattern
of his twilit working
hours as he paces
back and forth
tail behind
him, night before, and contemplates
the inconsistent waves
that lap across his small
steady track.
To a shutter every movement is one
frame after a frame after a frame as
long as light lasts a mystery resting
between the captured moment to moment
changes and the true events every frame
is a movement too soon or too late
for the world which can only so long and
in so many lights make a smiling
face which rarely stands still to be taken
The geese cannot be pleased to see
more snowshod ground than when they left.
The season has been kind to them,
too kind, and they have shed their deep
down feathers of resentment and
thrown off despair to cry with the
impassioned convert, I am free —
I fly now for the promised land!
The television turns to shadowed moors
Where harmless made-up murders are performed