in an Irish Garden after Cromwell

it’s a meander              & possibly meaningless as far as 

the faeries & angels are concerned                 more like  

a fly in the ointment reminding me of our Irish garden  

before Cromwell – the flowery medes of distant plains – 

its structures disappeared        & still       now      I move on 

to new plantings as the old get tired: tier by tier  

& terraces for pleasure           reading tiny flowers (violets  

& daisies & cowslip) – compensatory – sitting 

in front of the farmyard cottage in the wood kitchen chair 

drug out to the gravel path                 hollowed out 

I’m nowhere near a wave’s curl in this breach         but not  

too far from an ocean                        & I recall I liked it best mid- 

country & northerly – short-mown lawn amidst icy  

patches – (roses still climb the stone walls stacked 

in hungering times) just a guest I couldn’t know 

the raw of that killing 

turf                  or cloistered: nuns & friars this way & that 

& I could have guessed      I suppose      if knowledge is time  

& dwelt at Muckross (I bought a woolen hat there  

that I never wear)                   you just wanted me  

to see the encircling yew – for refreshment you said – 

(hot in love & not so strange            we drove  

all round the island of your greatest affection) & in native ever 

green      cooly shaded     cast in rooted toxins for an opening 

of poisonous euair foliage (did cattle  

succumb at breakfast?           I wouldn’t know I’m only 

a curious visitor) in a clearing all around us of other  

gods & golds as leaves in passing       ceremonial remembrances  

though I can’t now clearly recall that holy tree (the three of us  

have not since met again) nor the ancestors 

vibrant           once                  at the lowering  

of the hand               that quells                     the break