Cork

 May 27, 2024

Clayton Hotel, Cork City. A bottle of Prosecco sat in ice awaiting me when I entered, and my room has a balcony overlooking the south branch of the River Lee. Lovely, and lovelier if the weather cooperated. The three legs of the journey were grueling. I sat in the lounge in JFK thinking, “this is too hard.” Travel from now on won’t be casual. But I’m here now, and all is well. The pain in my foot curtails my usual strategy of walking and walking till I know the environment pretty well, though in fact I did limp about while my room was being readied, and found the theater, despite its having been marked deceptively on the tourist map. I asked four people and three people told me wrong. They’d never heard of it. One sent me to the Opera House, and the girl at the desk there knew where the Cork Arts Theater is. The theater is dingy and small, exactly what I’m used to. Rain came a couple of times, went away a couple of times. Having been in Cork several times in the past isn’t helping me much. Certain things look familiar, but I’m not meshing them together yet. Odd dream trying (successfully, as it turned out) to sleep on the plane.  MH came to live with me, and convinced me to hire a friend of hers to do some remodeling. The friend and MH tried to take over my house and my life, and I caught them, by no means certainly in time. If I stood close to MH I noticed her flesh was rotting and old mucous had gathered about her nose. How do people earn being in dreams like that? Decided to taxi from Shannon, an expensive choice, but a necessary one given the state I was in after landing. F was my driver, eager to talk politics and well informed about matters on both sides of the Atlantic. I impressed him by being able to cite my favorite places in Limerick, his home town. I’m quite familiar with the land around Shannon, and I realized to day what sets it apart from American landscape. It is completely filled in. In America the land is torn and interrupted, heterogeneous. Here, it is of a piece, like a tapestry, or a pre-Raphaelite painting.  Worked on a play in the Delta Sky Lounges, despite being staunchly drunk. First supper, at the hotel,  disappointing, violently overcooked salmon with barely identifiable vegetables. Excellent sparkling water