Mabinogion Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Another long thing
To make the ladies squeal, I suppose,
Dark and sleepy trolled up
From the Welsh bog:
A faceless eel born under the pregnant moon,
Something which has held its nest
Under the consistent cogs of the waterwheel,
While lives under the honest sun
Turning out like pretty peonies stuffed
Into the bicycle’s basket,
And wound around the block a little rickety
From the cobblestones, but content,
Because her legs were like pistons of spring,
Cycling the petals and fluttering her skirts,
Bobbing her knees,
As she disappeared between the mossy cairns,
Took up the language of blind shepherds
And their loyal sheep dogs;
They say in the oldest mountains, now hills of
Weathered time, they blistered there lips on forgotten rhymes,
And began to make love atop toppled stones,
Made love like open psalms,
And the windows open, and the hills laid bare
Like praying palms,
The sacraments, the Book of John,
Her eyes the truest reason that brought the storm,
Flooded the lake, and shadowed the orchard,
Rolled across the valleys and thought up the gale,
Replaced her last name with a new verse,
Which lifted the waters up from their banks,
And awakened the shadows from their briny beds,
Thus they came to her where she lay weeping and discovered,
The wreathing multitudes, the slick intrusions,
Slithering like scars upon the water’s placidity,
Disembodied phalluses of drowned horses,
Riling in the blundering darkness and madness of indigoes,
The apoplexy of the cold blooded swarm,
The ancient intrusions in a complexion of grievances;
And she let them upon her in great balls of
Cold pain,
And they tightened around her and told her
Her name,
In the language they still keep over the wall
Where those who are living don’t visit at all,
So afterwards, pale as a midnight scar, she laid
There on the bones which now gave reasons to darkness,
Thus her lips were shut, and her eyes were shut,
And her mouth spoke no more,
As the rains swelled and swallowed her whole,
And they took her down into the clutch of rounded stones,
And there decorated the dark house
With her young bones,
Leaving her blind shepherd to wander alone,
Around the dark lake now her dark home.