Finishing Mariani's Outrageously Long Life of W.C.W -- Nathaniel Tarn

The redundancy! The slab screaming for an editor!
But the love - intention satisfied.
Unconquerable, the scrabble
over snow in the eyes.
The bird in the yard nervous, never resting.
How the man
managed for so many years
to fight blindness
(the wearing down of hope)
matter of poetry.
Thrashed. In his chains, thrashed
bird bruised, imprisoned in its cage,
the cage always too narrow.
(He, of his own will,
would not have kept a cage).
The women's freedom: girl,
the kore weaving to and fro
his only motion!
Impossible to know
how hope survives
these adventures raised against it.
These banners raised against it.
How it continues,
year after year,
believing in itself, tired at moments,
then rejuvenating as if blood
were alcohol.
Ah that liquor! Brims with enthusiasm,
enlightenment, epiphany.
Tropical restlessness,
those dazzling native islands,
army of spiders marching on ocean.
Out there, over the river,
his radiant city
of spider webs, that fragile and that strong.
Making it to the end, the very end,
the yard itself a cage now, holding him,
and nothing furloughed,
a courage of it - an outrageous courage.