The Saints-For Bloomsday Poem by Morgan Michaels

If you thought them rare, or worse, extinct,
think again. Assure yourselves,
there is a land where they abound
like birds on a telephone line at enormous dusk,
preening and taking comfort in each other's presence.

And you are almost there-
just another hundred miles or so to paddle
before that shore where you reach the beach the boat,
drag it over hot, pink sand, inverted, toward a stand of trees
near where rears an oddly quiet headland.

Out they slip, delighted to greet you,
from between trees, singing hymns in Portuguese,
hands clasped piously behind,
thin silks blowing like line-dried octupi, the golds
of their Olympian ideals slung about their necks.

E-mail home you have seen them
in tense, short clauses. Cc
everyone. Say, yes, of course, you want to be in their number.
But, for heaven's sake, delete the expletives.
Yes, delete the expletive.