Primitif(02?)

I.

Mackworth Island, sign (in paraphrase):
natural materials for the fairies’ houses only.
Do not bring materials from outside the island

(that means plastic bags, cans, and bottles,
things that won’t decompose among nettles
or things, like tin or gold, that stay.

That means pooper-scoopers, soy milk
quart containers, the waffled aluminum lining
of cigarette packs--and that means you.)

--What woodchuck cannot overtip the teepees?

II.

A slate wall, a mossy ring among cathedral pines
where Governor Baxter’s hell-hounds were buried,
a place with more-than-slight folkloric connotation
perhaps in how the light slants from the tree-tops

to be a center for a sword’s unsheathing, plunge
on tabula rasa, tree-trunk: local materials only.
A slant of light lands theatrically on headstones.

Take your materials with your problems.
Here everyone is deaf to them.
The banshees peal to their delight alone.


III.

In Brian Boru’s bar, from head to toe a girl tattooed
with motifs carved in the granite lintels overhead--
warriors and magi on drinking benches all squat and grim,
and in the down-curl of their mouths a nascent realism.

Every other word in this brave new world
she utters on the harbor is a curse to friend or lover
over the din to the cell-phone.

(And runic letters, red as if written in rivulets
of gore, announce: drinking consultants only.)