News For The Delphic Oracle

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 sighedBy Oisin on the grass;There sighed amid his choir of loveTall pythagoras.Plotinus came and looked about,The salt-flakes on his breast,And having stretched and yawned awhileLay sighing like the rest.Straddling each a dolphin's backAnd steadied by a fin,Those Innocents re-live their death,Their wounds open again.The ecstatic waters laugh becauseTheir cries are sweet and strange,Through their ancestral patterns dance,And the brute dolphins plungeUntil, in some cliff-sheltered bayWhere wades the choir of loveProffering 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 wallsFrom where pan's cavern isIntolerable music falls.Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,Belly, shoulder, bum,Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrsCopulate in the foam.