Wake me in South Galway, or better yet
In Clare. You'll know the pub I have in mind.
Improvise a hearse — one of those decrepit
Postal vans would suit me down to the ground —
A rust-addled Renault, Kelly green with a splash
Of Oscar Wilde yellow stirred in to clash
With the dazzling perfect meadows and limestone
On the coast road from Kinvara down toward Ballyvaughan.
This is the life I wanted, and could never see.
For almost twenty years I thought that it was enough:
That real happiness was either unreal, or lost, or endless,
And that remembrance was as close to it as I could ever come.
And I believed that deep in the past, buried in my heart
Beyond the depth of sight, there was a kingdom of peace.
And so I never imagined that when peace would finally come
I
It starts in sadness and bewilderment,
The self-reflexive iconography
Of late adolescence, and a moment
When the world dissolves into a fable
Of an alternative geography
Beyond the threshold of the visible.
And the heart is a kind of mute witness,
Abandoning everything for the sake
Of an unimaginable goodness
On a backwards-running clock in Lisbon,
By the marble statue of Pessoa;
On an antique astrolabe in London
Tracing out the sky above Samoa,
Thousands of miles away — in time, in place,
Each night conspires to create a myth
That stands for nothing real, yet leaves you with
The vague impression of a human face.
“Nothing but sunlight and gleaming,
linoleum flecked with flame,
a thick coat of wax that flashed
down a corridor and led to a room,
a place where I curled up a few
innocuous inches off the floor.
Straps — word out of strophe,
the restraints of line and stanza —
straps hung in loops on closet hooks.
On the nightstand a basket with
peanut butter crackers, a vivid
and unnatural orange, a crinkly
wrap. A knee-high fridge stocked
with icy juices, foil boxes, straws
glued on. A female voice next door
And the man said, what has the dead man left
if not to be philosophical,
I’ ve plenty of time here at my disposal
to solve the deep meaning of it all.
The man peeked in himself and knew
in this life there is no riddle.
Flags of all sorts.
The literary life.
Each time we dreamt we’ d done
the gentlemanly thing,
covering our causes
in closets full of bones
to remove ourselves forever
from dearest possibilities,
the old weapons re-injured us,
the old armies conscripted us,
and we gave in to getting even,
a little less like us
if a lot less like others.
Many, thus, gained fame
(from her to ravish meaning ravine On the other side
artifice slumbers in the green. The shadow follows hour
by hour hollow and gloomy and which call me forth)
………………………………. grafted onto the sentence
o a long time distant to hang on my belly obscure parallel
images and tattoos age suggestive of the fingernail grazing
the thigh the valley get turned on
Now and again
I am here now
And now is when
I’ m here again
