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!
