Irish Fathers

Another morning made stale by
work’s dissipation;
he made sluggish use
of a dull razor
and from his face
did Guinness bleed.
He dabbed at it
tasted his ancestor’s elixir
and laughed at the mad poets
and the drunk Foggy Dews
and drove to work
to bask in the flourescence.

Returning home his children cried,
“Tell us again, Daddy,
about the Children of Lir!”
And he said:
“You are children of the Irish Sea
shape-shifters one and all
wearing your skin fitfully.
A tight fit you find it?
It’s because you are of the sea
restless as the waves,
having your father’s father’s
father's brine in you!”

The next morning, tired-eyed,
he returned to his shaving mirror
but missed the reflections
of the Kings of Meath,
Armagh and Tara.
Hungry for want of fathers,
he missed a sea of them.

_______________________

References:
Children of Lir
Foggy Dew

I’d always been attracted to the notion of profligate waste, the more profligate the better. Waste appealed not only because of my naturally parsimonious ways but because it mirrored the profligacy of the natural world. A million fireflys and butterflys die on arrival, long-lasting as fireworks.

Eccentric characters and underachievers held my affection. I saved newspaper and magazine clippings of plumbers or mailmen who could quote long sections of Moby Dick or who’d read 10,000 books. “Dropping out” was attractive in all its delicious permutations. A pretty nun was a figure of wonderment; here was untapped potential in all its inconceivableness. The sum total of happiness she could give a man over a lifetime could not be calculated by the adolescent mind.

Keeping a low profile as a child was a survival tactic but redeeming in its own way. I read May Sarton devotionally, growing terrariums and tending aquariums and missing the clues of her sexual orientation. I looked covetously upon the shores of Walden Pond as depicted on my copy of Thoreau’s work. He was Robinson Crusoe come to life, acting like it were actually possible, laying out the cost for seeds and wood but then he quit and went back to Boston and it felt hollow. A year and a half out of fifty? He called it an experiment but it seemed a failed experiment, else he wouldn’t have high-tailed it back to civilization. Only the permanent is romantic.

Uncle Bud used to take me fishing. He had the leather, reptilian skin of someone who’d been out in the sun every day of his life and didn’t know SPF from the ATF. A born fisherman, he’d look out over the water and after ten or twenty minutes I’d be getting ants in my pants but he’d sit there like Mount Rushmore. I’d walk around the lake and grab at the cattails and look for dead fish near the bank and inhale the intoxicating dank smell, and then come back around and see if Uncle Bud caught anything. There weren’t near enough action I thought. I’d bait my bamboo pole and put it in the water and pull out a wormless hook.

I'd sit and stare at the water and wonder if there really were any fish under all that water. They said it was stocked but maybe the other fisherman already caught all the fish. The water looked the same as soil, only with the relentless ripples.

Uncle Bud was actually my uncle's father, so he was getting on in years. Ever-bachelor, he lived by his own rules and died by his own rules. Got cancer but wouldn't have anything to do with doctors. Holed himself up in his house like an outlaw with the law outside yellin’ for him to come out, so the hunter shot himself. There was shock in the horrible coupling, good uncle Bud and Judas’s final sin.

I ache for him to be in heaven because the thrill of waste ends at Hell’s gate.

Belloc’s sweet prose stiches somulence over me. I can't read him without falling asleep because he has charms to soothe the savage breast. I fall into the rhthym of the sentences and it satisfies what I didn’t know needed satisfying. He inspires me to try.

I am a mad scientist longing to string words together in new and strange and potentially explosive situations. I want to know where the powder lies and where the fuse is and I want to light it. Roth’s prose is too painfully current, he brings all our sores to the fore and would heal wounds by probing them. Belloc and Bellow and Dineson heal by pointing elsewhere. The gashes are healed by cunning indirection.

Mary Slaney blamed it all on “Torn Between Two Lovers”. Her dissipation that is. MacGregor’s hit song came at a time when Mary was distrusting the old verities and here was another sweet-warbling Mary with a voice so pure that she sympathetically thought, “torn between two lovers…that can happen.”

Pop songs made love beyond the borders of marriage okay. There were no shortage of angelic-voiced innocents singing of shedded inhibitions. It was as if the radio were filling a need for Mary and Juice Newton was singing her song:

“I see no need to take me home,
I'm old enough to face the dawn.
Just call me angel of the morning, angel”

This was what she needed, reassurance that what she wasn’t doing anything wrong. And not from a guy, not some cad who’d say anything to get into her jeans. No, she wanted to hear it from a girlfriend, a girlfriend experienced but innocent.

College was easy, her sorority sisters comfortable in their skin and sin. “There’s nothing wrong with it Mary!” they said. Cross-wearing fornicators, they’d ask her to find another place to stay so they could entertain their men, even as the silver jewelry made fashionable by Madonna dangled from their necks. They said they loved Jesus and their life. They seemed to have married justice and mercy, their will and God’s.

And so began the long struggle for Mary, who took the long road to and from the wilderness, arriving at last back to her true home only to find a surprise waiting.

The surprise was to find that Christians are all cross-wearing fornicators in one way or another, and that all, in big ways or small, try to marry their will and God’s. And it struck her as she donned a cross necklace: "Can I wear this silver jewelry?"

Gunner Kearney walked each morning to Kate Kearney’s Cottage and drank a single shot of Paddy’s Old Irish Whiskey before computer programming under the fluorescent lights of a large multi-national. The walk to Kate’s was metaphorical, only in his mind, a pre-work ritual to briefly color his world ethnic. The morning coffee would suffice for entertainment, the liquid of the damned. Caffeine was invented was to make dull jobs tolerable.

He walked in a world filled with vague resentments and veiled anxieties. His friend Arness dreamed dreams of lofty vision. He had elaborate plans of marketing “essence of scorpion”, a distillation of dried scorpion cartilage that could be applied as a powder or spray. The scent would be ‘musky yet smooth, with a pinch’.

One Tuesday for lunch, Arness and Gunner left the large multi-national and got in Gunner’s Taurus and traveled wordlessly for miles, reaching Kentucky by two and Georgia by five. They drove till the soil bled clay-red, replacing the exhaust-riddled February snow. They entered a two-bit bar on a one-lane road, a saloon picked at random, and stayed when they learned the barkeep had Paddy’s Old Irish Whiskey.

After the third shot of Paddy the joint began to look like Heemskerck painting. The bottles lined up behind the bar like a collection of future promises.

“How can a fella get in trouble around here?” Arness asked.

“Now why would you want to get in trouble? You look like Yankee accountants to me.” said the owner, a puffy-faced man with craggy hands.

“Not accountants but close. We were at work this morning in Michigan and now we’re here. We’ve discovered the elbow of the desperation curve. Arness, you 'splain.”

“Yeah, we used to talk about the elbow of the curve financially, that point at which we had amassed a nest egg that would basically double on its own in a few years and make our retirement a fait accompli. Instead we discovered that there is a point on the graph where desperation tends to scale off the charts, basically at that point where youthful enthusiasm ends and only ten thousand, three-hundred twenty-six working days stand between you and retirement.”