a.
irish stew:
brendan behan on the wagon again,
a raucous fiddle burning through the pall of mist
as my plane prances into shannon.
b.
my suburban past is a mottled carcass,
a wooly mammoth that won’t go extinct.
i need to erase it from the world
like a junkie needs a fresh vein,
like a plumber needs a plugged-up drain.
brand new couches left to wane
in the front yards to nowhere
cars are like glossy tumbleweed
that wait for a heartless wind.
a grand jury of smog-drenched stars
has uttered its cosmic verdict:
fortresses of sheetrock and plaster
are beside the point.
c.
in my imagined youth, i slept
atop a comfortable dolmen,
went to school, alone,
inside a beehive hut,
had a sheep for a pet.
in my made-up youth, i wept
when a tourist called me quaint,
used peat-chips for timber
in a furnace that would never quit,
made sure i never owed an english debt.
body-shape like a guinness pint glass,
leprechaun legions cheering my victory
as i became the hero on a hurling pitch.
donkey carts were employed in droves,
and no parish priest frocked in unspoken guilt
made me his altar-boy bitch.
in ireland, the rain is wetter.
d.
there is no divinity
to patinas of concrete,
there is nothing sacred
about backyards anointed with pesticides.
under the faint slice of moon,
hallucinations come too quickly.
e.
connemara, tralee: a rainbow blooming at night,
a jade carpet for legions of jigging fairies,
twirling wisps of fagsmoke, groping upstream.
failed bets inside an ancient pub,
between old friends who always have a grudge.
f.
at this moment, i prostrate myself
in a savanna of bog, trying to remember
where all the snakes have gone.
g.
i laugh profusely in this density of green- a copper salmon
begs the quaking rapids for mercy, as a freighter
roils into cork harbor at a jogger’s pace,
crab-claws litter the shadowed sand,
the ocean and its rueful wishings
left to remind us
that we are even less
than we think we aren't.
e.
dearest ireland:
my suburban past is a mottled carcass,
as i devour chunks of irish stew
with some emigrant’s silver spoon.
