W.B.Y.

by Jack Foley

W.B.Y.
     for Robert Sward

Gone at 73,
Poet of Ireland
Poet of the Other World
Looking for its traces
In the Wind
Among the Reeds
None like him
For the passion
Of renunciation
“O what a sweetness strayed
To barren Thebaid”
“The foul rag and bone shop
Of the heart” —
Three books
Quote that line
And leave “foul” out —
None like him
For the continual
Recognition
That language
Always goes beyond itself —
Innisfree
Haunted by the words
Of a 3rd-century Neo Platonist —
The immense distance between
This world
And that other
From which
The “voices” came.
Love of the woman
Love of the woman as symbol
The tragedy
That spirit
Lodges itself
In the mire
Of flesh
And that a woman
Must grow old —
Not “unity”
But the fierce knowledge
That all we have
Is the power to know
What we cannot be or emulate.
The swans
Leap up in the pool
And descend again, and leap again.
I love him for the clarity of his monumental, daring,
unerring vision.

.

I have lived with him throughout my life
Lived with the symbols
The magic that leapt about his table
Lived not where he walked
But where he thought
In that sky to which Helena Blavatsky brought him
Demon Est Deus Inversus

.

In the dark you entered in 1939,
Did Plato and Plotinus welcome you?

Did your soul rise, a falcon in the air
Ignoring cries to bring it back to earth?

Did Cúchulainn honor you, show you the sword
That killed in battle frenzy the hound of Culain?

Did Emer soothe the wounds that ended you
And bind them deeply with a purple cloak?

Did honeybees ignore you in that dark
Where wild swans flew and fire sweetly burned?

Did all the gyres end, did darkness sing?

Did you become a consecrated bone?

.

Nothing is true, dear love, nothing is true.