And the Time Is: Poems, 1958-2013

The Real Reason for Going Is Not Just to Get There

75 The Real Reason for Going Is Not Just to Get There Killarney’s maps are for the unredeemed. The hidden land awaits the stumblers and the temporarily confused who find their destinations as they go. In Dingle there’s a history bone-final as the faith that founded Gallarus. All that remains is what was there when Gallarus began: God, man, sheep, and stone and stone and stone. Dingles ago the starvers saw their lips turn green from chewing grass before they famished in their beds. Their hovels bleach like tombs unroofed and riven by the sea. If only all the stones were beige or marble-white . . . Their fading grays seem unforgiving as a fate that only wit or tears or emigration can defeat. Sheep graze over graves. Loud gulls convene on garbage dumps. In Galway, Cashel and Tralee, I fish the air for what it is that makes the Irish Irish. Is it Seamus speaking Sweeney’s prayer 76 in Howth and telling me of Hopkins, “the convert,” buried in Glasnevin? Is it how it sounds to sing the music in a name: Skibbereen, Balbriggan, Kilbeggan, Bunratty, Listowel, Duncannon, Fermanagh and Ballyconneely? Is it Joyce’s map of metaphors that makes all Dublin mythical as Greece? Is it cairns of uniambic and unrhyming rocks transformed by hand into the perfect poem of a wall? Is it the priest near death who whispered, “Give my love to Roscommon, and the horses of Roscommon?” Is it because the Irish pray alike for “Pope John Paul, our bishop Eamon, and Ned O’Toole, late of Moycullen?” Inside God’s house or out their sadder smiles say the world, if given time, will break your heart. With such a creed they should believe in nothing but the wisdom of suspicion. Instead they say, “Please God,” and fare ahead regardless of the odds to show that life and God deserve at least some trust, some fearlessness, some courtesy. For Anne Mullin Burnham ...