For my Dad, Ted Marks  (1927-2021)

The high, Lapis Lazuli skies of flaming June
Are in absentia in damp and cold November;
For the patterns in the grass can not last.
And so we take the winding stair into the
High tower, above this land of forgetfulness
Where once upon a golden dawn good faeries
Danced a circle of rare delight within the sight
Of one John Mulligan who, on the last day of August
1938, according to the London Times (6/9/1938),
Met two fairies dancing near Ballingarry, West Limerick.
He said they were two foot tall, very well read and descanted
With both flair and style upon the Kabbalah, the Theosophists
And the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Fallen angels
Cannot be as close as fairy lore abides with me.
Faeries still mourn the fall of the unicorn and the rise
Of the cross.  Enchantment comes at such a heavy cost.
Only tears can show us the undercurrents of the old mythologies,
Those aristocracies of thought that bleed into the soil
And leach into the heart, where all great art is rooted.