The Center, or: The One in Which I Get Drunk

with William Butler Yeats —Temple Bar, Dublin once famous for friars and printers and clockmakers now in its yellow dressing gown, intoning: a river of vomit, a run of stags, hens, the final whistle, a moon like a sack of flour garrisons the sky, Bill picking up those Derry Girls at The Old Storehouse the bend between breath and silence like the shoulder of an Armalite O they sang American Pie while we drank and watched some troubled fool equine in length take a piss from atop a phone booth on Dame Street I couldn’t get the song out of my head for days Bill kept turning and turning the poem in his like Wilde’s address to Liberty naked I saw thee Shay and your slow thighs and skin like fine bone china the night a revelation or bad news on the doorstep.

What holds the poem together

fuck

all

gossip, sex, imperial measures.

No, I’ve never eaten Crab Louis.

God, you know everybody

in the world.