Last Resorts Neil Shepard (bio) Finifugal Finifugal: shunning the end of anything.Yes, there’s a word for what makes us human.When we gaze in the mirror, we approve ourselvessix nanoseconds ago, the time light requires to bouncefrom the glass’s dark underside to our eyes. I see blacklight, said Victor Hugo, dying. And every evening,we advesperate. The sun’s guillotined from the sky,and we think of the tricoteuse in France, knitting, unknittingas the heads rolled. We think of the old apricity,the warmth of sun in winter. And some of us miss the full lightof language, the archaic and the obsolete. What if we usedits full lexical range? All twenty volumes of the oed,130 pounds, 59 million words. What if we had timefor the research? Would it matter if we knew“that girl is hot” because fornicate comes from fornus,an oven, a furnace? Would that put people off? Would it hurtto know earth’s magma will, finally, blast pyroclastsin trails of broken fire when it’s hot enough, or worse, to knowearth’s flirting with the moon, its fickle push and pull,impels her from us a few millimeters more each year,and the planet slows its rotation one nanominute. In the timeof hot-blooded dinosaurs, each day clocked twenty-three hours.Does that give people pause? Does it matter the meter’s ticking faster?That meter and measure are one; meter and moon and mensesare one; meter and month and meal do the same work, measuring time?And we’re back to shunning the end of anything: finifugal. [End Page 17] Staigue Fort —Ireland, fifth century a.d. One hell of a world—so circle stones five-men highin Caherdaniel. Let stones curve between usand the sun. Pile them far up a cirquecupped in the hard hand of the mountain—for we’re all hard at it, bludgeoning each otherfor a hectare of pasture carved from Gaelic rock.Circle stones three-men wide. Wider than longspears can pierce. If we survive, we can sail to stonechurches just off the coast, live a few peaceable yearspast twenty-five, those final years when a spear’s heftno longer pleases the hand. When a spearand an arm become separate things.One hell of a world on any knocknarea,any hill of execution, in this country.So pile stones high up a hillside.Look down on invaders swarmingup the rocky valley, behind thema foaming sea. Ready the spear-points.Cross-currents pull the eye out, away,swirling ten miles to the Skelligswhere one-eyed Saint Finian, the leper monk,has built from stone the last resortof men, beehive huts, stony oratory,and one great round-church in a monasteryhigh up on that high island, up among the nestsof storm-birds, gannet and petrel—but I knowof one bird, the shearwater, that builds no nest,makes its egg pear-shaped and simply leaves iton a ledge to balance in the wind. It’s allin the shape of the protection, the proportionbetween the living thing and the stoneon which it suffers its siege. [End Page 18] Neil Shepard Neil Shepard’s sixth and seventh books of poetry were published in 2015: Hominid Up and Vermont Exit Ramps II. He teaches in the low-residency M.F.A. Writing Program at Wilkes University and at Poets House in nyc and edited for a quarter-century the literary magazine Green Mountains Review. Copyright © 2016 Neil Shepard
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Feb 20, 2023
Donna Talarico 
Open Access