Galway 2

October 12, 2008

Went to mass at St. Nicholas this morning. It was lovely. Remembered the rector and some of the choristers from before. Half the congregation was African. One little boy of about 5 did a dance before the altar before the service began that made me think that Anglicanism was not his only religious experience. He made the rounds of the chapels with his arms flapping like an angel’s. When he came to a place where a breeze had blown things awry, he straightened them up and then flew back toward his mother in the congregation. I had been watching his every move, and him unaware, and I thought he was wonderful. It made me think that maybe someone was watching us in our best moment, when we thought we were undetected. The rector stared rather disturbingly at the floor while he preached, but the lesson was a good one, about the golden calf and that parable where a king gives a wedding feast and nobody comes, and so he kills the former invitees, and one man comes dressed improperly, and the king has him thrown into the outer darkness. I thought in some vague way he was addressing Lambeth, and the idea that certain things remain important to God even if they seem trivial to us. I don’t know. I was convinced by it whatever it meant. The rector told me an anecdote of being trapped in a dry county in North Carolina and having to scour the neighboring communities for liquor. We sang the Agnus Dei in Irish and the recessional in Swahili. "Hallelujah" in Swahili turns out to be "Hallelujah."

Went to the Nun’s Island Theater last night to see David Hare’s Via Dolorosa. It was a bravura performance of something that would have been a fine lecture but was not a good play. I couldn’t really understand why someone would want to present it as a play, except that it was a thoughtful argument intelligently expressed, and I suppose that has a place on stage. I was already drunk and staying awake became an issue. I had forgotten how oddly and roughly Irish theaters treat their audiences, gruffly telling old ladies that it was "too early" and they would have to stand outside until the mystical right moment imbued the ticket booth. Big theaters like the Abbey have a bar to take off the chill of it, but for the most part, and irish audience is tolerated more than welcomed. It’s something we do better.

The fat, imperfect moon sailed over the waters of Galway Bay as the old ladies and I waited to be admitted into the theater. Maybe that’s why the management delayed.

Wanting to get a running start, I visited as many bars as there was time for. The ones we patronized in summers gone by have changed. Zulu is now the Salt Box. I actually got lucky with the ladies last night, a sort of irony, but who knew except for me? Holly and I at the Salt Box talked for a long time. She passes the hours at her boring job reciting the names of the American states. We did it as the bar, only one of the M’s was missing. Only two people in the world knew what was happening when I rushed into the street and shouted, "MISSOURI!" and a blond crossed that street and hugged me joyfully. The Pump that Ellen liked so much is a date bar, happy and lous, with a band jammed into the corner. I liked it. But then, I always liked it, even when its clientele changed from the grubby sailors whom I sought and found there first. Met Nick at the Salt Box. He came back to the hotel with me, and even stayed while I vomited the night’s revels, rather tempestuously, if I recall, into the toilet. Nick was unhappy that I smelled better than he did and wanted to borrow some of my cologne. I assured him that no such thing was necessary. Being violently sick before deepening an acquaintance is not, I suppose, a turn on, but it didn’t seem to matter that much, and I woke in the morning clean-headed and chipper as if I’d teetotaled all night. I do remember in one place they set a vat of Hoegarten in front of me bigger than anything I’d ever drunk out of before. I do believe I finished it.

*

Seeing His Son in the Street, Perhaps

When you get old you start too many sentences
with "Remember when?",
the tone of reminiscence creeping in
when you meant to order coffee
or ask for the window to be closed.

You scold the restaurant boy
because they once served thick cream
in old bone china and do not now.
I saw it happen for my forty years, and smiled.

So,
I have been walking and thinking all this day
on what to do to stop myself from growing old
and coming to Galway twice a year
to subtract from the old Arcadia
one more landmark gone, one more dark corner
reduced by the intrusive light,
from lamenting the swans, the two
and their chaos of cygnets, whom one knew,
who came to nibble from one’s hand,
who are gone, and the generation after them,
into the swan-transforming sea.

The boys that I remember are married, probably.
I’m a couple of nights they do not tell their wives about.

Yet, I did plight my troth, such as it was.
If they appeared on Quay Street
with their dark hands out
and their gray hair in their eyes,
their patience would be paid.
Perhaps they have, and we have passed as strangers,
such strange things have the years and hours made us.

I look into the shop windows, seeing the faces
I saw then, gold in the late light from the Bay,
the slow smiles, the hesitant raising of hands.

Here is the miracle:
I do not cry out.
I do not sink down on my knees upon the stone
and howl against the evening that has come upon them,
and on me,
nor against the ones to whom now all of it has passed,
so young, so accidentally beautiful,
levitating out of the shops
with their stupid parcels
and the gem green in their shadows.
Give me credit for discretion,
I do not say to one of them,
I think I knew your father.
White as the swan’s wing.
Black as the crow’s eye.
Red as dawn above the sea
The like of him will not be seen–
unless in you–again.

*
All Ireland is in a panic about the fall of the equities market, and now the crisis in Iceland. You have to be here to realize how much America is interwoven.

Waiting for MA to arrive from Dublin, I stood at the edge of Eyre Square long enough to hear a Chinese kid break out in a perfect rendition of "Fat Bottomed Girls," and then an Irish band strike up in the drizzle in the dark of the square.