Bounds

Sinon would have called your love a noble gift;
Those behind the wall would have seconded
And seen the bolt strike left, and still not lift
An eyebrow, because whose left anyway?

I portended ends that have not come yet;
Abandoned home in an all-weather country
For the flattening shade of Constancy
Where, above all men, we worship Aengus.

No. I mispoke. Worship is the wrong word
And Aengus does not fit. Keats' sedge knight
With his boggy shield completes this image,
A silver wanderer in ghostly woods:

His recusant hand skims wasting heathers
And drops likewise into shallow, withered streams
For a fish or woman who is not there--
Though the fish recalls that poet king
(Whose rodded harp-string sinks in growing grass),
Skinny and longing in the poet's grasp.

Sonnet for a Cockateel

From the ad interim stability

Of just being weightless underwater

I glimpsed the undulating form of mother

Come to subtract me from my camaraderie.

Her tideless ebb and flow bore peremptory

Guilt (that look in her eye that my father

Always spotted as something the matter):

My lawyer with no good news from the jury.

I rose my head above the muted purl

And breathed, pulled to the deck by heavy hands

That never could warm me, even when I

Stood wrapped and toweled in her lee. Unfurled

And resonating, the news came to land

And landed softer than the bird had died.