Stone blind, drunk, blind as Homer, 
 blind as musical gab must be, 
 O'Carolan harped his way across 
 the land Cromwell had reconciled. 
 Not lordly as the ancient dead, 
 this smallpox-scarred composer: 
 he remains a drifting voice 
 over bogland and hummocked pasture 
 where he never strolled, humming airs. 
 
	   Where are the Irish women 
	   who kissed and romped before? 
	   Gone, lost with their lovenames, 
	   their very bones dissolved. 
	   But one beauty smiles across their sky, 
	   across many a quill-scratched page. 
 
 He did his keening in the great houses, 
 pouring flattery's whiskey 
 recklessly upon fire-warmed stone. 
 No servant didn't know his kindness 
 or fear his scalding tongue. 
 Drunk on his deathbed, he rolled 
 to the floor, singing to all— 
 "It takes a great man to fall lying down." 
 
But rooks cry, circling sea cliffs, 
some car squeezes down a lane to the pub, 
and no royalty pays anyone for song. 
We pay ourselves instead, over and over— 
I think of the country jukebox I saw, 
where you could purchase silence itself 
at twenty-five cents a minute. 
 
Blind earth, blind sky, blind tune 
one part surf spray, one part seaweed 
flung upon uncomprehending rock. 
Yes, she twirls in baroque petticoats 
and high-stacked wig, yes, we nod yes 
long after she has skipped away. 
 
For we know her hand—would know it 
a lifelong dream away.  Saddle the horse, 
tune the balky harp—it takes 
a great man to orchestrate his dying.

Where better to worship music than church—
sanctuary amid sanctuary? 
Above us, some incense of desire swirls 
mindful and apart. Call it a lost bat, 
circling this quartet as counterpoint, 
as jazz dissolving their surging measure. 
At first no one sees the looping presence 
in the dusky rafters where, other nights, 
all eyes might focus, driven upward 
by words —but soon enough we feel quickened 
and succumb to names: bat trapped in the slow 
movement rising tidelike toward its own shore. 
It clings to the altar a while, then bursts 
into a tonic chord in the scherzo 
and now dodges whatever's above us 
we can't see. Some watch his light notes 
written on air, some close eyes or concentrate 
on their feet, but these four players merely 
grin drawing Beethoven out of the same 
flickering air. In the intermission 
the cellist says he'd like to hear music 
with bat ears: useless, maddening desire. 
Violinist says nothing useless is desired.

      Beneath the blue suburban skies
 
My radio goes wrong: an old song 
cuts loose this night, arriving 
like wind that shakes the cornstalks 
as I drive from one darkened town 
to another, from house of birth 
to house of marriage. I grope for the dial 
to clarify. Then comes a tide 
of ten-year-old patter, ads 
for dead companies, movies 
whose titles echo vanished slang. 
 
Yet it is song, song fading 
and swelling with these back roads, 
that keeps me awake tonight, 
that sweeps like my headlights 
over the trembling clotheslines 
and moonstruck farm ponds, 
wedging a delicate arc into the past. 
 
Nothing to do but drive on 
though the songs grow younger still, 
though they drift and bleed together 
and slip into other tongues. 
At the fringes of a town 
I know by heart, a few house lights awaken, 
bedroom to bathroom to yellow kitchen. 
A mailbox dented by some winter's plow 
floats into sight to the manic, brassy tune 
of "Penny Lane," though for a moment 
it looks more like my startled face.