1.
The diaspora.
It always has to be this way,
To let so much steam of wit escape
From the stream of the river gods
And follow the quays to Rome
And all its suburbs
In need of truth, in need of articulation,
Of lies
Told as if if only you could believe them
It would transform your life.
That Kalamata Alfredo
I ralphed up in Dublin
So had to spend the day
In the arms of Temple Bar Morpheus,
The poisoned harp,
Buses moved by mobs at 3 AM.
2.
My brothers haven't spoke in five years.
Because of some sexual insinuation I'm told
By one and then the other.
Towel snapping run amok
In the wreck of the family dysfunction.
One brother wouldn't go to my son's funeral
Because the other would be there.
It's like that here in shamrocks;
Some tribes have not made peace
For centuries
And doubtless never will.
It's not my problem, even though
It always has been.
One has to be wrong.
Brothers come pre-armed with fists
To fend off not being the smartest one,
Not so much to impart anything
As to claim as their stock
Some too-massive rock
Of lichen-stained stone
Upon pain of death at the faintest
Prick of false masculine pride.
Cuadon, home of Queen Maeve,
Where a plant-based sausage
Made my guts recoil like a rifle
At the colossal insult of Irish cuisine,
As its kindness, a fisticuffs.
3.
The hardness of life must be sent through
To others. That's the only way
To mix the seaweed with the sand
And eventually conjure green
Between the fierce iconoclastic stones
On Inis Mor.
There must be long days howling
At the howling here,
Nights nursed by fear,
Only the donkeys are ever
Truly sea-legged here
And the goats have disappeared.
On this island the blight never affected
The chips just won't stop coming from the truck,
Hot and magically delicious
In impossible contrast to the rest of Eire,
Where they're rotten, stale and moldy
But served with a straight-up face,
As if food was still allowed
To treat us like this.
They have other ways here,
Where the windows are still tiny today
Facing the vastest sheet of ocean
You'll ever see
Because the British taxed the sky.
There's nothing for the young here now
Because there isn't a soul who isn't
A cop, intent to rat you out
As if trawling vermin off the island.
They don't want you carrying on
With leprechauns,
Who are rife in the grasses,
Promising all the joy you can feel.
4.
It's the golden time for Irish youth:
Jobs with Google, smooth white plaster,
Hurling and Camogie every Saturday,
SpongeBob SquarePants in Gaelic.
Barber shops for all the lads
And witchsister covens for the women
Finally taking it on for themselves.
They tattoo away the old ghosts
Still warning this era of peace
Will bite them in the ass again.
They don't yet know
The truth is a curse
And its telling necessary,
Though they are finally free
Of the landlords and the churches,
The pubs and the bus bombs.
It's all too much in Galway,
The labnah and couscous
At the incomparable G
Makes me push the plate away.
The town is filled with immigrants,
Those who've fallen under the spell
Of that fabled emerald charm, from Tunisia,
Portugal, Aberdajzan.
It has almost become
That a smile means
You are happy.
5.
I can't finish my porridge
With the quince marmalade
For the second day
And have started to panic.
I have never been known to refuse
An offer of food
And have always devoured
Every crumb off my plate,
Ravenous on command,
Never debating what it was
Or what it tasted like.
In fact I've often surmised
Some past-life starvation
Made me feisty to win
The one thing offered freely
In the land of milk and honey,
More food.
So it was all the more surprising
When that karma quietly whispered
Between two limestone walls
On the hazel-gorged burren,
Where a family lived in its one room
And ate potatoes from a central soot.
No one knows why
It had to go down that way:
Five successive failures
Of the only crop the peasants ate,
A million starved dead, half the country
Forced to flee
To create the great American novel and dream
From the empty pot at the rainbow's dead-end.
I feel it in the pit of my stomach,
My great-grandfather docking your wage
If you spun out a nail, my uncle's
Go-to his shotgun draw
As response to any bickering,
The feeling I seemed to be born with,
Of having to prove I am enough
To pay for a soft touch from God.
But as with all those things
That are ugly but necessary
To force the uncooperative soul to grow,
There's been no justice, just remembrance
And not much of that, it's such a shabby
Karma to hold, which falls, as usual,
On those who endured it,
Not the barons who couldn't step outside
Their system of powdered wigs
Or the enlightened priests
Who like black mages spellcast a divine retribution
To cudgel the restives
For a shelalagh century,
But the stomachs of the blessed,
Who still move from anxiety to gift
As if they are one and the same thing.
It's purging week in Limerick,
The sweepstakes have finally come in.
The 6th Earl of Blarney paid off in the Fifth.
Can we let the horses run?
