In slack times visit I the violent dead

and pick their awful brains. Most seem to feel

nothing is secret more

to my disdain I find, when we who fled

cherish the knowings of both worlds, conceal

more, beat on the floor,

where Bhain is stagnant, dear of Henry’s friends,

yellow with cancer, paper-thin, & bent

even in the hospital bed

racked with high hope, on whom death lay hands

in weeks, or Yeats in the London spring half-spent,

only the grand gift in his head

going for him, a seated ruin of a man

courteous to a junior, like one of the boarders,

or Dylan, with more to say

now there’s no hurry, and we’re all a clan.

You’d think off here one would be free from orders.

I didn’t hear a single word. I obeyed.