There all the golden codgers lay,
There the silver dew,
And the great water sighed for love,
And the wind sighed too.
Man-picker Niamh leant and
By Oisin on the grass;
There sighed amid his choir of
Tall pythagoras.plotinus came and looked about,
The salt-flakes on his breast,
And having stretched and yawned
Lay sighing like the rest.
Straddling each a dolphin's
And steadied by a fin,
Those Innocents re-live their death,
Their wounds open again.
The ecstatic waters laugh
Their cries are sweet and strange,
Through their ancestral patterns dance,
And the brute dolphins
Until, in some cliff-sheltered
Where wades the choir of
Proffering its sacred laurel crowns,
They pitch their burdens off.
Slim adolescence that a nymph has stripped,
Peleus on Thetis stares.
Her limbs are delicate as an eyelid,
Love has blinded him with tears;
But Thetis' belly listens.
Down the mountain
From where pan's cavern
Intolerable music falls.
Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
Belly, shoulder, bum,
Flash fishlike; nymphs and
Copulate in the foam.
