by John Ronan, published in New Orleans Review, Winter, 2002.
 
 

A custodian winds the prompting clock,

present as everything, that prejudice,

in a room crowded with ancient artifacts.
 

Heels echo away in the hall,

as  the small, decorator spots continue

to shine on bright barrow gold.
 

Apart from which, nothing happens.

Time's the event, never vignette,

and anyway careless of a day's contents,
 

Summoned only reluctantly by the September

afternoon, an empty museum, by words

like day, era or age, that vespers.
 

On the clumsy coins, a dunce-struck

king, in dim witness, gallops off

clippity clop to the confident clock.
 
 
 

 
H(wy)

by  John Ronan, published in The Recorder (The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society),  Fall, 1999.
 
 

It might be anywhere, this dusty

road winding from Ucross to Ulm,

as you hike its scrub and shale, later

carving initials in the soft stone,

lying back to dream under a sizable sky --

I'll be good, I'll live forever,

bone-buoyant earth stretching off

to Dakota and Montana, a drained

Eocene ocean full of soil-swimmers

shoaled up in mid-life, mid-stroke.

It might be anywhere -- the road to Delphi,

or Deadwood, the Via Appia as it nears

the Adriatic at Brundisium, wherever

gravity  is the cause of flat water.

But it is the road to Ulm.  Continuing

then through Clearmont and Recluse,

and likewise, all along in there, Wyoming.