Four Colmanās Well
in memoriam, Michael Miller
All rituals are strange customs of the desperate,
the hard look for meaning, symbols made
of ordinary objects, gestures to grace them.
Consider modern strips of cloth hung in trees
by Colmanās well, colors in touch with the body
of someone sick or dying, the dearly belovedās
sleeve carried in a pocket up the raw rock slope
to the spring that runs through mossed-over stones,
ferns flourishing big as trees. Flannel rags
of cotton, wool, polyesterāthe trashed-up
forest a desecration of the Holy Well.
A dirty hand dipped and hung each clootie.
A persistent belief in a healing holiness Colman
would have wept to see, knowing all suffer and die.
Weāve walked a short way up from the road
in new boots and rain jackets. Hard to pick a way
through vines running everywhere on big stones,
wet mist dripping from leaf and stone lip,
mouth of rock. Ordinarily impossible to find
this tangled place, Colmanās cave and well,
the oratory he built before Rome imposed
strict rule and order for monastic life.
Here wildness itself claims and reclaims
body and earth, green breath in a bewildering
wilderness. Colman wrapped himself
in deerskins to keep warm, trimmed wild beauty
to animal essentials. A worried way to solitude,
the hermit-monkās discipline to let be.
Here under an eaglesā eyrie in the burren
with his mouse to nibble him awake, his fly to mark
his last-read word, his rooster to remind him of time,
Colman prayed, chanted Celtic syllables, meditated
in the morning and followed the evening flight of eagles.
A wall remains, an arch. We settle behind it
in the shade and summon his name. Any word spoken
is resonant. Cameras stop whirring and clicking.
Michael, whose idea it was to bring us to
this place, reads his poem about Saint Colman,
who denied himself all comforts except words,
their warm precision flowing from his mouth.
Weāve trudged up the kingās clattering Road of Dishes,
hardly aware of our noise and desolation.
Red Sails
All I can figure, he must have been Irish, the sailor
who sang on our porch after midnight, mother alone
in our house near the Navy Yard, her children sleeping,
my father on the night shift, not home until morning.
Night after night, the sewing machine light
the only light on, her fingers picked stitches.
I remember the stumbling boot on the steps,
the slosh of the bottle, the porch swing creaking,
the rough voice in the same song sung night after night.
Red sails in the sunset, way out to the seaā
Sheād be still for a moment, then switch off the light
and lie down beside us, listening, listeningā
Oh carry my loved one safely to me.
I could feel the ferocity of her vigilance.
I didnāt know for a long time all the pieces
of the story, the man who left her and went to the war
returned to his other wife in the North. Bigamist,
she told me, his sergeant rank stripped to buck private.
Somehow he survived the Battle of the Bulge
but never came home to my mother and his infant daughter.
Red sails in the sunset, way out to the seaā
Now that Iāve been to Ireland and seen them,
some bright blood-red, some faded, puffed full
in an easy bay wind of a Galway gloaming,
that rough sea-light on the harbor, the black pitch
hulls of the hookers, I know what the song is about,
the whimper suffered, withheld in the listening.
The name was Irish but Iāve blanked it out.
Woman Fishing
1
I dream a woman with silver hair fishing
an Irish morning lake; her slim canoe
cuts milk-opalescent skim of sky.
One arm stirs craters and vortices.
The paddle never lifts. The image moves
like a short film-clip of vanishing desires.
A red fin rises and rolls in the reedy edges.
Line whips and thrums, its formal elegance
drawn out to the last s-shaped uncurling
of the fly, the deep easy bend of the rod,
sweet play of the run, circling swerves,
the hand a simple slip in the gill, the lift.
I walk to meet her on the shore.
We talk and clean the fish and build a fire.
2
Crystal and silver are set on Irish lace.
The woman with silver hair looks at me
across the table as she listens to conversation
about the war, whether we should or should not
be there. Her husband sits by a peat fire.
Everyone laughs. Their son, on break from school,
talks to me, voluble enthusiasms about
anything Irish. I nod and listen and look at her.
Heās a lovely young man who reads Heaney
and Yeats. He knows about curraghs, a hookerās
red sails. Heās ferried out to Inishbofin.
He wants me to know what he thinks about
Grettaās secret and Gabriel, Trevorās restraint.
Today he hiked ten miles over the burren.
Above the ...