October 15, 2008
Patrick Punch’s Hotel, Limerick, more elegant and more remote from the center of things than I expected. We’ll see in a minute what they mean by saying the town center is "just a wee stroll away."
The Imperial charged me 100 euros for MA to stay. I should have made him eat breakfast.
Afternoon: The "wee stroll" is doable. I’m not far from the lovely park and the Limerick Art Museum, one of the world’s sweetest, and I veered off the main street to go there first. There was a book launch of a book of poems by one Marian O’Rourke. I stayed for the opening speeches (inexpressibly embarrassing, a filigree of Celtic rhetoric applied to nothing) and for the reading. The poems were not good, but missed being bad by reason of O’Rourke’s old lady modesty. The poems were doilies. One about a fox was nice. Had conversation with women who are part of the poetry festival, Cuisle, which begins tonight at the White House. I am "new meat" and I was rather popular at the reading. I gave the women a copy of A Dream of Adonis and postcards from Anna Livia, Lucky in Her Bridges. I strolled on to the Belltable Arts Center to eat soup and learn as much as I could about the poetry festival. I seem to have arrived at its outset. I will go. It will keep me out of the bars around the railway station where I looked forward to a different kind of adventure. By the time I came out of the reading, it was raining, and I had eaten a sandwich, so I was sick. But still I walked down to the road that leads to Irishtown, looking for the Central Bar, to give them a copy of Adonis, where the poem about the Central Bar and the god who once ate there appears. It is gone. Maybe I could find the god on the street if I looked hard enough.
Part of the flood of information that came out of horse-Kevin’s mouth at the Roisin Dubh was the fact that Guinness is now owned by a French conglomerate, Daigeo. I had wanted to buy Guinness stock, but couldn’t find the listing. Kevin showed me the way, and so I bought, and am gleeful now each time someone orders a pint in my hearing. I was disappointed with the location of Patrick Punch, but it situated me so as to learn of the poetry festival, and make myself known already this time through in a little way.
I wish I had given myself more time in Limerick. I feel a lightness here that I do not feel in Galway, less heroic, less heavy with the burden of the time to come.
Evening. Have become friends with Marian O’Rourke and her crowd of exceptional mature ladies. We found each other again at the opening readings at the Red Cross auditorium. Whatever my expectations, Sasha Dugdale and Pat Cotter gave fine and fascinating readings. I do love poetry, and wonder constantly why not everyone does. Even the effort to listen to Cotter and Dugdale in the bad hall and get every word was a kind of sensual pleasure. The quick answer to my question is that people are too lazy and too used to quick gratification to pay the requisite attention. But is that the correct answer? And if it is, is the strategy to browbeat people into attentiveness, or to make a kind of poetry which leading edge, at least, is so immediately enticing they approach of their own volition? I could not imagine why what I was hearing would not seem to everyone more fascinating than a video game or a rap song. It was harder, of course, and relied on something more than automatic reflex, but is that not part of its appeal? I must do something–something in addition to what I’ve been doing all my life–to achieve the renewal of poetry, else a great prince in prison lies.
I compared the festival to what happens in Asheville. It was not a happy comparison. The poet-lovers of Limerick are forty years older than those of Asheville. And fewer. And the poetry is better.
A chandelier fell in the White House. It lay in disgrace on the bathroom floor.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Galway 4
October 14, 2008
Put MA on the bus to Belfast in the driving rain.
Cupid Reproved
Consider those thousand valuable things
which have nothing to do
with the longing of a body for a body.
Fixing an appliance, or writing a poem,
or achieving those peaks on the meringue
which I despair of–
or walking an old street in an older city,
thinking those thoughts of such fragility
they disappear into the air
at the honking of a horn or a
panhandler whining from the shelter of a roof,
those thoughts that might not be of bodies after all.
But me, I am a body in a world of spirits,
lumbering, slipping in my own sweat,
crying like those Calibans on the stage
when they see their Setebos aflame
in starlight above the bog of nettles.
Me, I cry for the body,
and the body turning away,
and the memory of the body
become a ghost among the ghosts.
Cupid, you bastard, with your arrows
which maim but do not kill. I never learn
Me, I am a spirit in the commonwealth of bodies,
hovering and beneficent, uttering my blessings
on those whose wounds must open
with the opening light,
whose sorrows return with the naming of a name.
When the book is opened we read them out,
and they are stabbed each time.
I utter, yet, my treble blessing on them who are
unscathed, and may rewrite the Book of Life
by going so into their graves.
I turn at the whispering passage
of those heroes who themselves
abide in forms of light
and bend in greeting each to each,
the fire within the living fires co-mingling.
Hope no more and fear no more.
On that strange corner of the strange streets
they are bidden, play.
Cupid, you footstool, lie down on the old street
while I climb.
Bodies I loved are wrought in flame and steel,
and I have done it,
and there is none to tell me how.
Visited Moyra Manifold at An Gailearai Beag on Flood Street, to confess to her that she is the original of Ellen in Anna Livia, Lucky in Her Bridges, and to offer to send her a copy of the play.
Cruised the evening, going from bar to bar where I have been comfortable. At each I turned at the door and said, "Goodnight, and joy be with you all."
A lad walked into Taafee’s with a woman who was clearly his mother. I thought what it would have been like to bring my mother into an Irish bar, from which she was separated by one generation only. I literally could not imagine it. That made me sadder than anything.
Put MA on the bus to Belfast in the driving rain.
Cupid Reproved
Consider those thousand valuable things
which have nothing to do
with the longing of a body for a body.
Fixing an appliance, or writing a poem,
or achieving those peaks on the meringue
which I despair of–
or walking an old street in an older city,
thinking those thoughts of such fragility
they disappear into the air
at the honking of a horn or a
panhandler whining from the shelter of a roof,
those thoughts that might not be of bodies after all.
But me, I am a body in a world of spirits,
lumbering, slipping in my own sweat,
crying like those Calibans on the stage
when they see their Setebos aflame
in starlight above the bog of nettles.
Me, I cry for the body,
and the body turning away,
and the memory of the body
become a ghost among the ghosts.
Cupid, you bastard, with your arrows
which maim but do not kill. I never learn
Me, I am a spirit in the commonwealth of bodies,
hovering and beneficent, uttering my blessings
on those whose wounds must open
with the opening light,
whose sorrows return with the naming of a name.
When the book is opened we read them out,
and they are stabbed each time.
I utter, yet, my treble blessing on them who are
unscathed, and may rewrite the Book of Life
by going so into their graves.
I turn at the whispering passage
of those heroes who themselves
abide in forms of light
and bend in greeting each to each,
the fire within the living fires co-mingling.
Hope no more and fear no more.
On that strange corner of the strange streets
they are bidden, play.
Cupid, you footstool, lie down on the old street
while I climb.
Bodies I loved are wrought in flame and steel,
and I have done it,
and there is none to tell me how.
Visited Moyra Manifold at An Gailearai Beag on Flood Street, to confess to her that she is the original of Ellen in Anna Livia, Lucky in Her Bridges, and to offer to send her a copy of the play.
Cruised the evening, going from bar to bar where I have been comfortable. At each I turned at the door and said, "Goodnight, and joy be with you all."
A lad walked into Taafee’s with a woman who was clearly his mother. I thought what it would have been like to bring my mother into an Irish bar, from which she was separated by one generation only. I literally could not imagine it. That made me sadder than anything.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Galway 3
October 13, 2008
Night of a happy day. Under the full moon the kids on Eyre Square are shouting and cavorting, happier than any other children of this world. We sat and watched them, and were joyful with their almost transcendent joy. Playfulness is among the most underrated of human qualities; it sweeps all before it into the realm of joy. It is a kind of meditation.
It was a perfect day. Showed MA Galway, as much of it as we could cover, from Salt Hill back to Eyre Square. Took the long walk along Nimmo’s Pier and then along the shore, coming disappointed to a closed Celtic Aquarium. I showed him my old digs on the Sea Road. It was good to have somebody to walk the streets with, to talk to of all the things which have delighted me so long. I chattered like a magpie. We ran into John Nee on the street. He remembered me. I sure as hell remembered him. Trad music in Taafee’s and the Crane. Walked the Long Walk and peered with envy into the windows of the lucky people who dwell there. A heron watched us from the river stones. A lapwing cried. Met Kevin in Roisin Dubh. Kevin wants to buy a stallion for his mares in East Galway and revive the craft of breeding Irish racehorses. He wants to raise them in the mountains so they develop enormous stamina. Never have I seen one with more radiant excitement in his eyes. He would have exploded had we not been there to hear his story.
siochain
Night of a happy day. Under the full moon the kids on Eyre Square are shouting and cavorting, happier than any other children of this world. We sat and watched them, and were joyful with their almost transcendent joy. Playfulness is among the most underrated of human qualities; it sweeps all before it into the realm of joy. It is a kind of meditation.
It was a perfect day. Showed MA Galway, as much of it as we could cover, from Salt Hill back to Eyre Square. Took the long walk along Nimmo’s Pier and then along the shore, coming disappointed to a closed Celtic Aquarium. I showed him my old digs on the Sea Road. It was good to have somebody to walk the streets with, to talk to of all the things which have delighted me so long. I chattered like a magpie. We ran into John Nee on the street. He remembered me. I sure as hell remembered him. Trad music in Taafee’s and the Crane. Walked the Long Walk and peered with envy into the windows of the lucky people who dwell there. A heron watched us from the river stones. A lapwing cried. Met Kevin in Roisin Dubh. Kevin wants to buy a stallion for his mares in East Galway and revive the craft of breeding Irish racehorses. He wants to raise them in the mountains so they develop enormous stamina. Never have I seen one with more radiant excitement in his eyes. He would have exploded had we not been there to hear his story.
siochain
Monday, October 13, 2008
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.
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.
The Airport Gulls
The gulls patrolling the tarmac at the Newark Airport
make me sad.
I have just left you behind, so sadness
inhabits the unlikeliest things.
But these in particular, the white gulls,
for they are home, with a nest in the stones nearby.
Yet with their slender wings they try the great Atlantic,
daring, skirting,
riding the rim of whatever tempest
rules the sea’s heart.
But home, as I say, wing to familiar wing
when the half moon bends the sphere of water.
I knew I would miss you when I shut the door,
but that the white seabirds
and the complicated coast
and the planes soaring outward (oh, ever outward)
should compose your form in steel and water,
that I did not see coming.
Victory to you. Rule our dent in the stones till I wing home.
The gulls patrolling the tarmac at the Newark Airport
make me sad.
I have just left you behind, so sadness
inhabits the unlikeliest things.
But these in particular, the white gulls,
for they are home, with a nest in the stones nearby.
Yet with their slender wings they try the great Atlantic,
daring, skirting,
riding the rim of whatever tempest
rules the sea’s heart.
But home, as I say, wing to familiar wing
when the half moon bends the sphere of water.
I knew I would miss you when I shut the door,
but that the white seabirds
and the complicated coast
and the planes soaring outward (oh, ever outward)
should compose your form in steel and water,
that I did not see coming.
Victory to you. Rule our dent in the stones till I wing home.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Galway 1
October 11, 2008
Imperial Hotel, Eyre Square, Galway. My window looks out on a specifically unscenic carpark. This might be well. There will be nothing to see in my room.
Threw my (quite destroyed by the Continental baggage gorillas) luggage down and hit the town, trying to take as much in as I could before jet lag and swollen legs drew me back. I sat in Java’s on High Street drinking tea, and wrote in my little journal–several times–"I’m drinking tea in Java café, looking through an open window onto High Street. And I am happy." I threw blessings around me to the left and right. If I were not so tired, I would still be out on the street blessing that Galwejians.
It has been a rainy autumn. The low places are wetlands, and the Corrib as a raging brown torrent, bashing the underside of the Wolfe Tone Bridge.
Café Journal is gone.
Outdoor market day around St. Nicholas. Bought a Camembert from the cheesemonger, which I had to do because he calls himself a cheesemonger. The fragrance of it fills the room.
PM: Launched out to find Tony O’Dwyer of Crannog Magazine at the Spanish Arch Hotel. I asked twenty people if they were him or knew him, until I slunk away defeated. Tried to take Paul Grealish’s poem to him at the King’s Head, but was told he doesn’t come in weekends at all. Like a tiger, I miss five times for every time I strike.
Imperial Hotel, Eyre Square, Galway. My window looks out on a specifically unscenic carpark. This might be well. There will be nothing to see in my room.
Threw my (quite destroyed by the Continental baggage gorillas) luggage down and hit the town, trying to take as much in as I could before jet lag and swollen legs drew me back. I sat in Java’s on High Street drinking tea, and wrote in my little journal–several times–"I’m drinking tea in Java café, looking through an open window onto High Street. And I am happy." I threw blessings around me to the left and right. If I were not so tired, I would still be out on the street blessing that Galwejians.
It has been a rainy autumn. The low places are wetlands, and the Corrib as a raging brown torrent, bashing the underside of the Wolfe Tone Bridge.
Café Journal is gone.
Outdoor market day around St. Nicholas. Bought a Camembert from the cheesemonger, which I had to do because he calls himself a cheesemonger. The fragrance of it fills the room.
PM: Launched out to find Tony O’Dwyer of Crannog Magazine at the Spanish Arch Hotel. I asked twenty people if they were him or knew him, until I slunk away defeated. Tried to take Paul Grealish’s poem to him at the King’s Head, but was told he doesn’t come in weekends at all. Like a tiger, I miss five times for every time I strike.
On the Road
October 10, 2008
Newark Airport, a very long layover mitigated somewhat by a bad, slow salad, and by wandering slowly around, looking at everything that can be looked at. Still picking grit out of my teeth from the salad. Western windows of the airport, golden evening light coming through
Newark Airport, a very long layover mitigated somewhat by a bad, slow salad, and by wandering slowly around, looking at everything that can be looked at. Still picking grit out of my teeth from the salad. Western windows of the airport, golden evening light coming through
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