For Mike Quill

PREDERIC WILL

FREDERIC WILL

FOR MIKE QUILL

This, Quill, is Lynchburg.

Mt. Jackson follows.

My father's house.

'Fore he

turd-crusted

and fat with

liver puddings made

Charlottesville home.

Man I've come from!

Yet not as though,

man, up

from the mills

but up from the silence.

Shenandoah silence

so that what I know

half know, even think

is at last furrowed

from loam the earlier conscious.

This, Quill, is Mt. Jackson.

Here Parnell was born.

Here Yeats.

Who themselves

with ash-staffs strode

Kehossic in spring

talking of the revolutions.

Yeats and my father.

You are thinking of Ireland.

The ships' lanes.

Green Killarney.

Seems to you this

fire is turf.

The whiskey blessed.

Cuchulain the topic.

Remembering north,

all your buddies

who cart the sea's genius.

Come have another.

I discern in your eyes.

Men stand in

line there,

down the endless retina.

The endless vehicles.

A city clumsy with feet.

There are Yeats and father.

They are coming toward you.

The mayor has hands on

his eyes.

The docks are aortas,

The world cut open,

Back flat on the sea.

The seas are the world's piss.

Shores its rank arms.

There is a whiff of despair.

Now you can remember the apples.

Your mother baked them too.

Yeats came down on Sundays.

Dad and Parnell joined.

You touched my birth.

Who would have thought that in Virginia?

Come into my silence.

Let the eighth of the colonies

wrap you, yeast in its loam.

Grow here.

Branching

into the wilderness of experience.

Dancing in still brogue buds.