I Am Happy

A tour of Dublin and Galway with WB Yeats in my head

Who will say ‘corpse’
to his vivid cast?
Who will say ‘body’
to his opaque repose?
                 Seamus Heaney, “The Grauballe Man”
                                               

The universe is
a museum. When I look up at the stars, at least one
light particle, warehoused all
the eons since our so-violent birth, suddenly
goes on display,
creating an event that proves
both of us existed for a moment.

Dim gallery of
ancestors (who may remain in earshot)—known and
unknown—old merchant seaman
trading out of Galway into Spain—handsome farm boy,
who ate nothing
but boiled oats his first college year—
his father, who embezzled from the grange.

And at the Crane pub
in Galway, a carrot-haired girl in a faded red scarf
sitting with two companions
and a sweet yellow collie mutt resting at her feet
or rising on
its hind legs in an eagle pose,
paws high, one ear forward and one ear back . . .

Our Dublin bar: the
Cobblestone north of the Liffey—“a drinking pub with a
music problem”—session at
half-8 with Mick O’Grady, including much singing.
Afterwards Mick
asked, were we singers, and said
he’d announce us if we returned next week.

Glimpse of the light green
Connemara mountains in the morning, rain covering
everything from noon on—if
not mountains, a good day at least to view the bog—
water pooling
in the trenches below the cuts,
backhoes resting on wide metal plates to

prevent their sinking
under.  A National Museum exhibit about
the Ireland bog bodies, with
photos of a peat-colored head, eyes open, pupils
still white; a brace
of shoulders like a giant crab;
peat-colored  arms splayed, hands still attached, nails

on curled fingers still
hard, a little wet and soiled as from digging in the bog
all the many lifetimes since
they were buried in it—now embarrassingly exposed,
lying naked
on that steel table—ungainly
heap by the white MRI machine door.

Whoever he was,
prisoner, hostage or criminal, the time came for him
to walk up to the sword blade—
disemboweled, castrated, quartered; flung deep into the
oozing cut; bone
calcium dissolved away; mummy
flesh resting in the airless, acid peat.

Swans on the Corrib,
paddling westward toward Galway Bay, past the Spanish arches
(partially destroyed by waves
from the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755).
Sing-song of our
gaeltacht Inishmoor tour driver,
by Dun Aengus and the Seven Churches . . .

Navigating the

Dublin city center: dead reckoning through the streets south
of the river, washed up for
the third time at the St. Andrews Tourist Center near
O’Neil’s Pub—at
last passing around Trinity
College, across the Liffey on O’Connell.

Veering off to see
the old Abbey Theater—Who stood in the post office
with Pearse and Connolly? Who
thought Cuchulain ‘til it seemed he stood where they had stood?—
disillusioned by
the bleak modern architecture,
deciding against tickets to Major

Barbara. Then north
to the Writers’ Museum—And what if excess of love
bewildered them till they died?
Now and in time to be, wherever green is worn—and
Brendan Behan,
the “drinking man with a writing
problem.” Walking back south through the rain, past

Trinity again,
umbrella blown inside out in the wind—toward Dawkins,
which would bring us to Stevens
Green and the Canal, home to Rathmines. That same evening,
the Writers’ Pub
Crawl—It's not nice of you, Didi.
Who am I to tell my private nightmares

to if I can't tell
them to you?—Oscar Wilde, deep in the Leadville mine, out-
drinking the Colorado
miners in whiskey—next-to-last watering stop
at the Old Stand
(called the Monaco in former
days): framed on the wall, a typescript—last

letter of Padraic 

Pearse to his mother—I am happy. People will say hard
things of us now, but later
they will praise us. I have not words to tell how my heart
yearns to you all.
Goodbye, dear Mother. I will call
to you in my heart at the last moment.

And we did end up
singing at the Cobblestone our last evening in Ireland—
and, as luck would have it, at
the Crane the night before, arranged by our friend Mary
who raised the stakes
for us, and we sang that great big
Spanish dollar, Shallow, Oh Shallow brown.

The universe is
a museum, save when the heart leads someone to believe
and to act against the odds.
A Pearce is shot. Someone arrives at the start of an
hour that counts, a
performance, a media
hit—maybe the moment that marks life’s end.

And tonight at the 

Crane, on my third Beamish, I think of that gaeltacht driver—
or is it the freckled red
girl’s sweet yellow dog, rising above tables, raising
its slender fore-
paws, barking softly: The farther
west you go, you go nearer to the rain.

Someone's Memory

Memory—not mine.

A ruby pitcher—cheap souvenir
of a World’s Fair visit
twenty-one years before you were born.

Fake crystal, garishly lettered:
Maggie
                 from
                            Blarney Castle
                                                           1893.

My vague recollection that you

received the pitcher from someone
after the death of my Great Aunt Jewel.

Someone’s memory

of you, a young child
for whom that ruby pitcher was
all precious beauty.

The Bulwark: First Blood Part II

Waiting for my breakfast at the Vanilla Bean in Two Harbors,

I notice a big blond man
with a big loud message on his back:

THE TRUE                                             THE ONES
                            HEROES ARE
WHO NEVER                                       GOT  HOME

Two red American-flag stripes frame
the profile of a soldier gazing sadly downward.
A spiderlike guard in a high watchtower
waves an AK-47.
Angelic blue eagle’s wings
droop protectively over the words:

                            POW  *  MIA

   The man is sitting close enough
that I have to hide the notebook page
onto which I’ve jotted the words on his t-shirt.
Only the man’s back is facing me
(broad shoulders, red neck, arrow-straight hairline),
but I can see his brown-haired wife front-on.
With her drawn American-gothic face,
she looks as old as he must be.
My take that he’s an ex-marine may be on-the-mark,
but my malicious thought that he habitually
beats his joyless-looking wife
shows how clichéd my thinking is.—
Likely he’s a kind, compassionate person,
who wouldn’t hesitate to help me out of trouble—
even knowing I’m a lefty.

  But I wonder . . .
That shirt looks new today.
The last American soldiers left Vietnam  forty years ago,
making it even less reasonable now than when
those old Sylvester Stallone movies were made
to think that American soldiers are still being held,
with or without American government knowledge,
in secret Vietnamese prisons—

  —the righteous belief that leads
another big ex-marine,
with flowing muscles and Tarzan locks (not blond),
bow and exploding arrows,
to disobey the hypocritical policy of his own government,
and search out the hidden jungle camp
where hundreds of tortured, starved Americans
are waiting for their beloved homeland to rescue them.
After killing the Viet Cong and freeing the POWs,
he confronts perfidious government bureaucrat
Marshall Murdoch with his bowie knife.
All he asks, he says,
is for America to love the POW MIAs
as much as the MIAs themselves—
ever faithful, though betrayed—
will never cease to love America.

  And isn’t this immovable rock of an ex-marine
sitting near me in the Vanilla Bean
with his indignant shirt
nothing but a brave bulwark of hope
undefeated in the face
of my smiling-bastard rational assurance
that the American MIAs were all already dead
by the time we left Vietnam?

Baby Poet (Store-Bought Garnets)

Having torn 'em from the card and rubbed off the glue,

I put 'em with some other rocks
in a little sectioned, labeled box
and brought 'em to school for Show-and-Tell.
The box had a transparent cellophane
cover designed to discourage fingers,
but the next day I had to complain to the teacher—
Mrs. Eggering—that my little green

garnets were missing—the cellophane
breached. Mrs. Eggering
must have been fed up with my rock collections,
because, instead of showing concern,
she bluntly asked me to please stop bringing
my boxes of rocks to school.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds

Ottertail County, Minnesota

On the twenty-second of June, 1919,
a great tornado came through Fergus Falls,
killing forty-eight people and destroying
the Swedish Lutheran Church and the Grand Hotel.

Family lore has it
that not long before my grandmother Delle’s death in 1935
from breast cancer,
a smaller tornado came through my grandparents’ farm.
There’s a picture of Delle standing dwarfed
among big downed trunks and branches.
Her hair is gray, and she’s wearing
a light apron or frock.
When I enlarge the black-and-white image, I fail
to get a better idea of her face,
but her distant forward-looking eyes zoom
to deep pupil-less black holes.

Family lore has it
that that small tornado blew a flock of blackbirds against the barn wall.
The barn was unharmed,
but more than twenty blackbirds lay strewn around beside it.
Delle ordered the kids to gather up the birds,
and she dressed them, baked them into a pie, and invited
all the relatives over for dinner.
It’s a testament to the force of Delle’s personality
that they all came,
and that they remembered the dinner afterwards,
passing down
a tradition of its memory, even to

this very moment.