The
Frames
by Phyllis Hoge
Thompson
Wait here. Listen. Presences soft as snow down
Are assembling, and you can find them becoming
clear,
Can't you, in the window? Water glasses, ice tinkle
of silver,
Declensions of tone and motion tell how uncommon
They are in their ordinary brown dresses, eating
apricots
And cheese. They will pull the mauve curtains
against heavy sun
Only, against blanching, not to hide from us. In
Dublin
It was the same--a lecture at Trinity, print
exhibits
At Mounjoy Square, and thick plaster-painted crosses
Made of stone at the museum, after a gritty bridge
Over the Liffey. Worn out walking to University
College
Through Stephen's Green, I saw, cast through masses
Of high hedge leaves, a thrust of metal, and there
Strayed as to some other celebrated Irish unknown.
But this was Moore's bronze of Yeats fronting rings
of stone-
That Olympian hurled single upon the astonished air.
There are some words a whole work is made for-true
acts and
names
That can't be written down. The mystery, kaona,
makes me tell
Riddles, and what is not true I can say readily. Or
I can tell
Crowds or strangers the truth. I take men without
names
To bed with, innocent, but not friends, whose
dangerous anagrams
Storm with kaona, and secretly punish me, a Spartan
With a fox at my heart, speaking for love to one
man.
Untellable reality forever hurtles from frames.
(02)