Ireland 11

August 8, 2012


Clucking of crows and calling of gulls over the high roofs. Took the car out yesterday and drove to Drumcliffe to do homage at the grave of Yeats. A man had been buried in 2011 only one space away from him, and I wondered what a man would do to be able to be buried beside William Butler Yeats. There was nothing on his stone to indicate he had done anything at all but lived and died. It was a scandal, I thought, that there wasn’t some list or hierarchy associated with being buried there, and that I wasn’t on that list. I arrived before the crowds and exited when a busload of, I supposed, Poles flowed in. While there I walked the river path, beside the red cows and the overflowing meadows, and found a house I covet, with one face toward Ben Bulben and the other toward Drumcliffe churchyard. The cat and the cock I remember from times passed were not there On the way I veered into Leitrim to Glencar Lake and the Glencar Falls, both lovely under the shifting soft light. I imagined horse drawn wagons and carts tottering down the same roads to bring the young of Sligo to the falls to woo and dream, the Yeats boys, maybe the Yeats girls, among them. One couple was being a bore, blocking everybody’s view with trying to get exactly the right camera angle and take a multitude of photos. I assumed they were German, without any further evidence, Continued to Mullaghmore, and put my toe into the freezing Atlantic. People were swimming, but in wet suits. You have to be in fine shape indeed to look good in a wet suit. My mind the whole time was dwelling on an image from the day before, of the red-beaked moorcock in his lake cove, all the paradise of green around him, clucking the cluck of one home and safe.

I was sad through the day in the number of ways a traveler is sad. Walked up Pearse Road, where I had dwelt for a while. The one time the whole journey when the sun was hot. A drunken man caught me looking at the sign outside the chapel on High Street, and explained to me that if I went around the other side, I could see the ruins of the high altar, and the place where his da had played the electric organ, which he still plays today despite the paralysis in his hands. “Me dad must be about your age,” he said. I asked him how old he was (he looked to me at least as old as I) and he said forty-seven. “That would have made me twelve when I begat you,” says I. “Ah, they say America is a miraculous place,” says he. In the evening I tried to hear music at the Chapter Café, but it was sold out. I protested, “But I am wearing my Years t- shirt!” but it did not avail. Instead went to hear a poet at the Methodist church read her dull, intelligent, over-long poems in a tone that suggested a ten year old who had just been presented with a snare drum, but I find her images stick with me this morning. She’s from Belfast, and I asked her if she knew MA, and she did not. Lucky to drop by The Harp afterwards, and joined seven young men from Glasgow who were watching the Olympics. They were clearly a cohesive group, and respected each other. One lad said they were some kind of class and the dark man in the center had been their teacher. The Glasgow accent prevented me from hearing what kind of class it was, but I think something to do with heating and air conditioning. When the Irish boxer won, they turned down the TV and their leader began to sing to a guitar. He was a strident, pleasing tenor, and his men, when they knew the song, provided a bass harmony, pretty much on one approximate note It was wonderful, one of those blessed moments of artful spontaneity that seem to happen here, and if they happen across the water I miss them. My heart was filled at last, and I could go back to the room and sleep.

Interesting that the thick Glaswegian turned into pure American when the lads sang.

In the last dream before waking Jack Parsons and I were in a great attic trying to find the clothing we had worn to some event and then inexplicably left behind. The attendant accused me of trying to get something different from my own, which I was, in fact, doing.

Morning constitutional down the river to the two holy arches and back again.


I would have done fine as a Sligo boy.