A woman I made love to thirty years ago
is sitting in her motel room telling me
how much she's come to admire the Celts,
their jewelry, how beautiful it was,
all those concentric spirals, and curves,
but I can't tell if she's trying to seduce me
or still making amends for her mother,
the way she's suddenly reminding me
how much her mother hated me
for being Irish, and from Brooklyn,
And for not kissing her ass,
she leans in confidentially to remind me,
but I let it slip between us like a shadow
because I can't bring myself to tell her
how indifferent I was to all of that
the moment she was trembling beneath me
like an open wound, and then I'm
slowly sinking down inside myself,
half-listening to her go on about the Celts,
how civilized they were, that the women
kept their own property after marriage,
Something that didn't happen here
until quite recently, she says, as if
wanting to comfort me in some odd,
historical way against the vagaries
of my second divorce, but I’m so deep
I can barely hear her, and then, all of a sudden
(Con’t.)
I’m swimming like crazy to the surface
because I hear he saying something
about the Celts stripping themselves
naked, painting their bodies blue
before hurling themselves into battle,
that even Caesar feared them, she says,
and here she pauses for a moment,
as if searching for the right word, and then,
suddenly, she says it: Because the Celts
were so fatalistic, and all of a sudden the women, and the rage, and the blue, naked bodies
are circling all around me, looking
for a place to land, and they
almost do, because I almost
say to her: They were like us, artists,
how else can you explain it?
but I don't, because I know
it's not quite right, and then
a voice inside me whispers: The women
were as fierce as the men, and then:
They honored everything, and suddenly
the women and the jewelry and the blue,
naked bodies come whirling down around me
like a flock of crows and I'm saying to myself: Honor, it was honor made them what they were,
but when I look across the bed at her,
I don't know what to say because
I don't really know what I mean
by honor, or even how to begin
to explain it, so I say nothing.
What is there to say?
What can I say,
I who have honored nothing.