The Plural Visitation

 

by Brett Rutherford

Now cut that out! I have weathered a lot

of discord in this urban arena:

the fenced-in barcarolle of neighbor dogs,

the rising and falling of conga drums,

the melodious yowl of cats in heat,

gunshots or backfires, airplanes and truck-horns,

the underground rattle-roll from tunnels,

the swell and deep shudder made manifest

by continental drift — somehow I have slept

through all of that. So now it is you:

The rag and wraith of a banshee I have spied

before (one blighted Hallow’d night I watched

one extricate itself from a tangle

of unyielding shrubbery), but that was

you in the singular, your lonesome cry

dissolving to a wisp of midnight wind.

This Brooklyn visitation is plural!

Twelve pairs of bony hands reach out to me,

from a hen-pack dozen of whirling shrouds.

Faces, if you can call them that, jut out

with insect eyes or blobs of black jelly.

Their twelve-part chorusing, from ruddy bass

to the highest squeak-screech of violins,

piles the diabolus in musica

and partners every howling note chromatic

with its half-step brother, an elephant

falling on every organ key at once.

All this, and on and on for hours, all this

from your wingbeats thrust into my window.

Who sent you? I am not even Irish!

Therefore, these whistles and yells cannot be

addressed to me, you howling telegram!

You have the wrong building entirely.

The errant Kelly, the drunken O’Brien, 

Leary with all his guns and bombs, have moved.

And why, I ask, come you in committee,

the way you dropped en masse for Spanish Flu,

or the starvelings of potato famine?

Oh, friends have died, and some died horribly,

but one by one they left me, unsummoned

by anything that tread night’s canopy.

When my time comes, I will see a raven,

a bard’s beckoning, a stately ibis.

Again, no son of Celt or Eire sleeps here.

The cat is Siamese, for goodness’ sake!

So gather up your mealy, dustmop heads

and flap on off to somebody else’s

premonition of death, you silly birds!