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.