Faith
A golden shovel poem, after Yeats

I wake and I’m turning
I sleep and
I’m turning
the earth clinging beneath me in day spinning and in the

night the widening
breach between sense and longing, the gyre
of tossing thoughts, feet drumming in the
dark, longing like falcon
for mouse. Oh I cannot
find it again, can’t hear
again the
lost voice, the dear falconer;
lost these decades since, of all things,
of all unrequited loves, the fall
from grace, apart
from what grace I make myself, the
fragile web, the cunning cob at the center
weaving, weaving, the knots that cannot
hold
me in life forever in fear, I am mere
I am merely, and my heart––weirdly young––beats like anarchy that is,
as when I first was loosed,
or lost, upon
the
world
a broken colt, a lost lamb, the
chaos of my young bones, blood-dimmed,
swimming always against the tide
as I was, as he is
lost, losing, loosed,
and
though I look everywhere
and though I swim on and on, the
submerged ceremony
of mournful whales, of old dreams, of young bones, of stubborn innocence
despite all valiant strokes against the tide is
never never drowned