From Chariot, published in May by Wave Books.

I have aspired to the ease of the drink-steadied harper
who lives the tune so thoroughly his fast pink hands
dance over the strings like some sharp thing made sharper
when it’s put to use—a family of thing I can’t seem to land

on any member of at present, but its heraldic emblem
pinned behind me like a charm would be the gold cat’s paw
chopping cabbage for the supper I’m forever assembling
on a field of green to set before the Bard of Armagh.

How I love to drift off as I did all through boyhood
into the daze of my birthright as a person, even if back then
this inwardness felt like thieving liverwurst sandwiches one should
leave on the platter for the hardworking women, the men

who need all the more to be propped up on the shillelagh
of animal protein. I myself was satisfied reclining on the straw
I share a name with all afternoon, festooned in the Boyne Valley
of self-tillage, grazing millennia with the Bard of Armagh.

The sun hums me awake again! Life is over half over.
Spent in deference, as ever, to those with much more than me.
One can feed their grief or one can cook up ways to cover
lack over with graciousness. Neither way will set you free

but one will keep you safer put. Death won’t embrace me
frowning, or it might—but I heard a tune today, and felt an awe
only we who drift far from shore can, a beauty as if meant to save me
in the curragh of its moment, rowed by the Bard of Armagh.