Whiskey

Which is foolish to praise
for it took my grandfather’s
sopping life and wrung it out
like the old checkered shirt
he always wore, wool sluffed down
to a sheen of green threads,
but still it comes more or less
directly from God, one of the great
charms against the several forms
of pain and the one nostrum
for ague that really works,
taken with the juice of a
sour fruit, heated in pewter
over a candle flame: Of course
it makes you dream—it takes
you down into the vegetable soul,
but look, it makes you also
resemble the spirit, which it is,
in that you will think you are your
essences and so recite the sadness
of the body. It is not metaphor.
It does not need us. Neither is it
pleasure in the same way that a man
or woman might be comfort to the other,
or in the way a small child might run
to you, glad for your face or voice,
and yet its acids will bathe you.
And it sings. Take it down quickly
in the small glass. There is Ulysses
tied to his weathered pole, and there,
in the sun that is setting among
the strong fires of the vanishing world,
are its voices, so sweet, so naked. All
is not well, but no bell is struck,
and the watch sleeps, forsaken. The
oracle says, you will die alone
raving in a squalid room, and none
shall weep, and you nod and smile,
for that will not be today when
the wind is in your hair, and the sea
breaks likes diamonds under your
fine ship, rocking, plundering forth