A note to any Irish poet considering my advances

(in response to John W. Sexton and for Dax, of course)

The sodden, sucking stink they grew in? I danced lightly across, doing the sevens, as if it were high dry prairie.

(Plus, the King of Luacar owes me a favor for my help with something I swore never to reveal.)

If you were my lover— her soft, firm thighs and rolled-back eyes and her screaming filthy howls kept from me

I’d leap that creek and its steep bank without a thought, using my crutches with their tornado tips to fly so fast that merry little band in the tree wouldn’t know if I was coming or going.

From the sky, or from hell.

If I knew my lover —with her wild green eyes and thick, soft mouth, her panting desperate cries and her elegant, back-gouging fingers— was in that dwelling of yours? It wouldn’t matter what door I came through.

The south door? Please.

I’ve had sprites mistake me for a man and try to enthrall me who wound up

demanding I go harder, faster, more, more as they rocked back on that pistol I pack in my hip bag for just such occasions;

who pledged their undying love or at least something like it, waving me on with an exhausted hand, forgetting their task entirely.

The north door? Come on, now.

When I was a young butch, I held down the wolves that lived in my backyard next to the rusted-out cars on cinderblocks that were filled with vicious goats and psychotic chickens, and I poured pine tar on them— just for sport.

You think some hound, some silly cur with a sticky pelt and a mouth full of madness could make me even break my stride?

To get to my lover, I’d chug his drool down like Old Style and leave him a cicada husk baking in the sun.

Your sídhe princess?

(Now there is a terrifying prospect, ain’t gonna lie. I want no truck with any of her kind and have spent considerable thought and effort on the problem, actually: door haint blue and bent pin in my sleeve, salt over my shoulder— and I always look before I spit.)

But you have never heard the sound of my name in my lover’s mouth, like a jewel, like a poem, like a wonder whispered in the velvet summer dark.

For her?

Anything.

If you were my lover, I’d sweep you up in my arms and you’d forget your betrothed like yesterday’s news. If you were her, I’d give back your sword (surely if my lover couldn’t return to me, then someone hid it); we’d fight, back-to-back and sideways like a crab, holding tight no matter what your affianced turned us into, until we were free of that drafty little dwelling, trailing entrails and tar and marrow vomit from the heels of our boots all the way home.

*

But, as you are not my lover (and instead yet another Irish poet prancing as a stoat fancy as you please around the countryside in front of God and everybody —curse my endless, endless tripping over Irish poets and stoats when I visit my ancestors’ bones—), your hound and your sprite and your hazel and your betrothed

are all safe from me.