Easter 2000

—in homage of Willie Yeats

Late last night, my dreaming
was interrupted (Spiritus Mundi?)
by that lank, long-coated figure
who came and went as he pleased...

The whirling
of his deeply-intuitive, ordered
mind still present
from my long evening’s reading of him

(Saturday night—post
Good Friday...)
Now in my sleep,
his dream does come:

As Christ climbing
the worn stone stairs
to issue forth his Great Refusal
of Pontius Pilate’s "relativity";

top of The Tower, the door opens
on a room full of ragged claws—
pedantically dissembling T.S. Eliot—
hollow echoes all ascuttle

on The University’s waxen, wooden
floor...
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart

as by rote we repeat
the polite meaningless words of the herd
until you have dried the marrow
from the bone.

Easter Sunday morning, I sat outdoors
talking to a friend after Mass—
in the courtyard ran children,
through the spring-bright air, full of candied treats.

For some reason I was telling my friend
the Native American Wisdom Tale
of that archetypal trickster, Coyote—
(perhaps lanky as Yeats) being spotted

off in the distance; loosed off the leash
are some kennel-bred John Bull’s, all eager
with misbegotten Decorum of Duty...
Looking scrawny by confere, old Coyote

doesn’t seem to have a prayer...
Yet as if effortless, along he lopes, buffer-zoned
as these pudgy mastiffs, one-by-one, drop...
(the sun’s heat on the parched earth too much)

Now my friend and I, having lived
where motley is born, speculate—
What wounds, What bloody press
Dragged into being

This loveliness...Before us,
beneath the sensual music
of birds in the trees, a woman
who stands young and beautiful—

perhaps the Nobel Prize Muse
of whom an accepting Yeats once spoke,
with a great Lyre in her hand...
loveliness raised into being...

Yes, and in her eyes I see
that Promethean fire
sparkling right
still...

(Shakespeare on my mind now—
the conversation having swung
to that Sweet Bard Will,
whose birth and death day,

‘twixt Good Friday and Easter Sunday,
was marked by player’s performing
’fore children whose soul clap of hands
confute those who traffic in mockery...)

Before us, this tall Celtic lass, her human love
nobly protecting the wee child in hand, talks, too,
with a friend (as us, bitter crust...forgotten by youth?)
Bored, her son breaks free to play.

In a flash he’s back, with a small cart
used to coil water hose for the garden;
crossbar grip just the right size
for his three-year-ish bodily form, his tyke legs

propel the cart mightily towards that invulnerable tide—
the edge of an empty fountain pool...
Back he draws...another run!...
Apollonian hair Helios-radiant...

Yet the crackling of hard plastic wheels
over the concrete courtyard
draws the danger-tuned awareness
of his mother made anxious...

"Coo-hoo-linn, mum, " he protests,
"He’s all battle-weary
with fatigue and he thinks
the sea waves his enemy."

She—not impressed, not thinking as me,
Willie, it was for this that ‘the wild geese spread
the grey wing upon every tide’—
demanded he stop and return...

Yet the young man—some mournful
wonder nobling his visage, mirroring
a still sky—yet he
would not surrender his wee Irish war chariot.

Biography

Tom Noonan has freelance'd from the Manhattan glass-officed canyons of "in-flight magazines" to the toe-up, sometimes mean streets of cabdriving "Oaktown" (Oakland, East Bay Area, California). Currently his "great ambition" is to escape the medieval wage-scale given those audacious enough to "shake-a-lance" for the shimmering-sand beaches of Maui...

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