| <- Back to main page
|
In Dublin, he dreamed he was a stag
chased by hunters with tradesmen’s faces.
The crowd, the mob, had no use for antlers,
thoughts that were different from theirs,
thoughts beyond O’Connell Street, the stench
of the Liffey that drew seagulls by the thousands.
Thoughts, points, on the stag’s brilliant head
made his heart hard enough to deny his mother
on a cancer bed the solace of knowing
he’d kneel at the altar rail, take the host again.
Three times he denied her like Peter.
The price of knowing, being chased,
hunted, was poor rooms in foreign cities
Nora said “weren’t fit to wash a rat in.”
He outran them all: bill collectors, critics,
patrons who wanted only his soul
to cancel household debts. An arrow didn’t
kill him, one or a hundred, just a burst appendix,
though he danced an Irish jig three nights
before he died. He was buried near the zoo,
close enough to the lions who roared
in the twilight, their time to hunt and quickly kill,
as if they roamed wild on the savannahs,
as if the stag wasn’t mortal, running still.