and I can hardly refuse. I know
you’ll carry me down to the Rouge
when I’ve grown too frail to walk
but still need to watch a river
spill over rocks. I hear the old
prose unroll, laughing and babbling
as it descends from some mythic Irish
wood to crack its consonants against
those hungry and bigoted days
cramped in a carriage bearing us
from pothole to pothole toward a crypt
and shrinking us with gossip and sideglance
though the music of the telling lifts us
like a kind of horse-paced tonic
offered up to our impervious time
of famine, screeds, and echoing guns.
Healing comes late, when it does,
and always with a voice like water–
water that pummels the stone.