08/24: for the chins
Aug 25, 2017 · 1 min read
Talk about disappointment: fair Dublin
green from afar, then gray, then fading back
into some pre-industrial chagrin,
the shades layering into vague smokestacks,
the cement dank with rain under our skin.
You resurrect yourself when she-sun sets,
with strung lights and bright twilight and the fin
of Beckett’s swung-bridge slicing at my left.
My hunger for your history’s a sin
of gluttony; I stalk your walks for signs
of ancestors, for forebears, for the chins
of fathers and their fathers’ famined lines —
I find them collapsed, cobbled on the Life
that flows, a vein, into your ravaged riff.
