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 sighed
By Oisin on the grass
There sighed amid his choir of love
Tall Pythagoras

Plotinus came and looked about
The salt-flakes on his breast
And having stretched and yawned awhile
Lay sighing like the rest

Straddling each a dolphin's back
And steadied by a fin
Those Innocents re-live their death
Their wounds open again

The ecstatic waters laugh because
Their cries are sweet and strange
Through their ancestral patterns dance
And the brute dolphins plunge

Until, in some cliff-sheltered bay
Where wades the choir of love
Proffering 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 walls
From where pan's cavern is
Intolerable music falls

Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear
Belly, shoulder, bum
Flash fishlike, nymphs and satyrs
Copulate in the foam