In November, in the days to remember the dead

When air smells cold as earth,

St. Malachy, who is very old, gets up,

Parts the thin curtain of trees and dawns upon our land.

His coat is filled with drops of rain, and he is bearded

With all the seas of Poseidon.

(Is it a crozier, or a trident in his hand?)

He weeps against the gothic window, and the empty

cloister

Mourns like an ocean shell.

Two bells in the steeple

Talk faintly to the old stranger

And the tower considers his waters.

“I have been sent to see my festival,” (his cavern speaksl)

“For I am the saint of the day.

Shall I shake the drops from my locks and stand in your

transept,

Or, leaving you, rest in the silence of my history?”

So the bells rang and we opened the antiphoners

And the wrens and larks flew up out of the pages.

Our thoughts became lambs. Our hearts swam like seas.

One monk believed that we should sing to him

Some stone-age hymn

Or something in the giant language.

So we played to him in the plainsong of the giant Gregory

And oceans of Scripture sang upon bony Eire.

Then the last salvage of flowers

(Fostered under glass after the gardens foundered)

Held up their little lanterns on Malachy’s altar

To peer into his wooden eyes before the Mass began.

Rain sighed down the sides of the stone church.

Storms sailed by all day in battle fleets.

At five o’clock, when we tried to see the sun, the speechless

visitor

Sighed and arose and shook the humus from his feet

And with his trident stirred our trees

And left down-wood, shaking some drops upon the ground.

Thus copper flames fall, tongues of fire fall

The leaves in hundreds fall upon his passing

While night sends down her dreadnought darkness

Upon this spurious Pentecost.

And the Melchisedec of our year’s end

Who came without a parent, leaves without a trace,

And rain comes rattling down upon our forest

Like the doors of a country jail.