Don’t doubt it when the core samples prove
how pleasing it could be to be woken by a baster’s
rain at dawn, cool grass wet with the benign.
Your tormentors are yet to be born, or fell asleep
a millennium ago. Your beauty is the beauty
that does not dispense with struggles—it wears
loafers the color of gun-metal, a face full of
second thoughts, eyes you’d like to believe
are supernatural. Agreed: aspiring to eyes of a color
not found in nature is very lace-curtain Irish,
and you do resemble one of Yeats’ twilight boys,
the walk cold from counting house to pub, 
the Easter Rising over—but the purpose of your days
isn’t simply to meet cute, it’s to be changed.
We inherit a marshalling yard full of dark freight,
but the track switches work. How much of whomever
you are after all is who you were when you
were the stony theologian of Westport Harbor?
Maybe in a quiet moment in the backyard today
you’ll look at a spray of tea roses leafing out
and hear the rain inside them whenever a breeze
blows. Don’t let possibility go away in pain.