Lang lang wies fra Rio

and a lang lang wie fra hjem.
as hazard would hae it
to write in Scots
or even bother to write in Scots --
the language that could have been and never was --
and for all my ancestral energies
that have blended elsewhere
It doesn't shame me to join
a Roman Empire or two
in their equally farflung and implausible
Lusitanian provinces
where time and its ill-abode
consign us to these other barbaric tongues
derived of empire,
like you, my dear,
your olive face articulate in all protestation,
as you wander from my eyes and tell me
over your shoulder,
that I am indeed a puerus, a child to you.

A British barbarian, while you, Germanic or Levantine Jew--
who had not quite explained this to me
not that to me it would matter,
except to know how it might matter to others--
would presume me a convert to the parties of the whole of the empire
east and west, and their cult of christendom -- pretty ideas, I must say --
though I never quite bought the business of the pregnant mother who is unfucked
nor of a son who arises and proclaims that he came from a mother, unfucked
except by god, and that this to all should explain her virginity.

Pause on this point.
Heresies were established
and people were incinerated over this doubt.

Lang lang fra hjem.
Det var lang ago...

Longer than all I could remember ever
than even I could think to remember

Except when I look into your pale brown eyes
and wish only the flesh round your pale brown eyes
and your pale brown eyes,
and you, perhaps, or what I presume to be you,
attached to them,
on a day when you are quiet
and when I am without concern
for fleeting moments to be fully beside you.

to whisper in your ear
with no pressing urgency
that nothing any longer
no longer is presumed.

from the very broken field
which I myself
have mistaken
for history.