Anne Walsh(for my grandmother)
You kept Irish on your tongue like the last Christmas candy
you try to keep going because you can’t get any more like that
You were never a local anywhere I ever saw you not since you left
Ireland so long before that your memory of it slanted like snow
under someone else’s memory of a streetlamp in winter
That furious quiet that anchorite white
an electric pink prayer falling up from its face
And you never went back
I’m sure that’s why I was born with a chest that’s a ship of goodbye
why I’ve left every place I’ve ever lived, why I’m a local nowhere
Why I carry goodbye with me like a business card, like hello
Why no one can place the where of how I speak
because the where of what’s underneath my voice
isn’t from here, it’s from elsewhere, the between worlds
I write past midnight, that the roots of Alder’s bridge
Me, The Elsewherefarer
since all my people before me were pulled from the trees
who cradled us in swaddling leaves and in rain that meant Everything
would be well and our wells deep as our own divining
The sticks didn’t matter, we were walking aquifers
we didn’t have to look for water, it was us, the song
Of stars in blanket bog and the sweet scent of turf
fire thick as chocolate in moonlit rooms
After blown out candles and clayed slanes’ wings rested by the flames,
it was no Big Bang to hold a stick that would turn for us
It was just to hold the Hazel, the hand of a lover
not to lead us to water, we were horse and felt where it was
The land we knew was a little bit of mud mixed with ocean my dreams
are still of dark seas like the mad core off Inishmore
where at night there’s no horizon only a crow wing portal
between here
And Tír
na nÓg
We didn’t come back in the morning
but we return every night by moonlight in my Clipper heart you
were nineteen when you had to leave Breaffy
and your dad’s new grave and the dog by the door,
twenty-one when you married a man in Philadelphia who hit you
when he drank and he drank all the time, how the time must’ve dragged
A dead limb,
a possum shocked by cat’s teeth
A fox the colour of sunset gutted by a man in a coat
who blew a horn before he hit you, made a sport of it
But there’s shale colour in a fox tale, ochre seams, the geology of listening
to stars biting into the sky of your eyelids
in the cathedral made of trees god built when she first fell
In love was your language
not the tick of a clock with only a big hand
sounding eternity in its hour of silence, set to the cuckoo bruises on your arm
and to the endlessnesses of you and the kids hiding
in the closet, untimeable forevers
(my hour ghost limbs still feel safer in a closet)
You couldn’t save them from him, especially poor little Joe
Did you dream then of the wolves of Mayo?
An even older memory than yours, could you hear
them howling in Philadelphia so far past
real midnight that Primary Night was again
and you ran in it with the wolves
and they spoke Irish
and the night sounded like a river
Did you remember then?
Did you remember the language of yourself in All
that blue light and lips curled off fangs
Running from a man to the wolves?
Tell me in Irish our Christmas candy language,
light my fairy tongue with choice
it seems I’ve made all the wrong ones, like you trusted
false loves who don’t speak tree
Now fifty
sleeping on a friend’s couch
Forge in my smithy mouth your master silver work of loss
and I will speak in our leaf language, with our alphabet of trees
and play with little Joe in all the Birches, Rowans, Alders,
Willows, Ash, Hawthorns, Oaks, Holly, Hazel, Apple, Vine,
Ivy, Reed, Blackthorn, Elder, Fir, Gorse, Heather, Poplar, Yew and Pine
who taught us Irish, that ear singing
their lullaby of wind
of rain, of wolves, of worlds, of no goodbyes
