To Scotland on the Occasion of the Vote for Independence

on September 18, 2014

If I were in Ireland three hundred years ago

I would be hedge schooled in militant

I would speak emigrant

I would despise the English empire

with the passion of a poet

whose hands have been cut off

in an age of illumined manuscripts

or whose tongue has been cut out

in an age of epic recitation

or whose dick–home address of Muses Rising–

has been cut off in any epoch

A pox on epoch!  A pox on’t indeed!

If I were in Ireland two hundred years ago

I would tell the story of Saint Kevin

and the dirty bird and the one about Yeats

dimpling in the Dory and the one about Pangar Ban

dimmed dun from sooted emigration

Ireland is a factory of memories

it churns them out all lunar year long

its songsmog infectious

to ancestor-deprived miscreants

like me whose forebears fled

the sloggy bog of sicke-sog

vowing on their dead Da’s grave

never to return

until the English empire

like a cart of bloody offal

upends itself into the Irish Sea

But if you were to look for me three years hence

you would be wise to look in Ireland

in Dublin near the quay I will be

bottling up those miscreant memory scents

tinned within a knight’s blue-black armor

of mussel shells as black-blue as the hair

of Paul Muldoon’s own true love

when she wears a pileus of raven wings

a wild goose after three centuries flown back

steadfast will you find me

and steadfast I’ll remain

until the sun goes down for good

and everyone everywhere all over the world

bottles up their soulscents and comes home