Classic Poem

What good did your blood do you
if it gave you honey under the tongue
a deep valley for the wind to lie still in
and sent you wandering
over the dams of timber sawn white by the teeth of beavers
over the badger country for hawthorn sap
and the sight of wild onion

It would be a good thing to sit quiet
Flesh salted on the wharves and eyes clean with brine
Talking chewing and talking
To sit with the bricks swept
and the wind steady as light shafting seaward
and the hard foam clanging upon the land

It would be a good thing to return
out of the cold now the seams in the ice cracking wide
the wild heart whoring the hard eye warming
to the nest of an oriole hanging like iron grapes in a pine
Talk about the afternoon you found a young goat
and brought it home in your arms with its legs dangling
and its muzzle pressed cool and wet on your face
Eyes beckoning a sail off the cold plains that lie like priests' gowns discarded
and the priests themselves in their white skins
lost in the music of the waves

What good did it do you
the softness of gulls' breasts in you
and a winter as hard as any winter
that lies in an old man's heart
Buried deep so that no light of the moon
or any light can draw you
out of the corpse-soil and the quiet
out of the nights that cry like wolves in the dark