Argyle, the sin-eater, came into being in the hard winter of 1984. My sons were watching a swashbuckler on television—The Master of Ballantrae—based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel about two Scots brothers and their imbroglios. I was dozing in the wingback after a long day at the funeral home, waking at intervals too spaced to follow the narrative arc.
But one scene I half wakened to—the gauzy edges of memory still give way—involved a corpse laid out on a board in front of a stone tower house, kinsmen and neighbors gathered round in the gray, sodden moment. Whereupon a figure of plain force, part pirate, part panhandler, dressed in tatters, unshaven and wild-eyed, assumed what seemed a liturgical stance over the body, swilled beer from a wooden bowl and tore at a heel of bread with his teeth. Wiping his face on one arm, with the other he thrust his open palm at the woman nearest him. She pressed a coin into it spitefully and he took his leave. Everything was gray: the rain and fog, the stone tower, the mourners, the corpse, the countervailing ambivalences between the widow and the horrid man. Swithering is the Scots word for it—to be of two minds, in two realities at once: grudging and grateful, faithful and doubtful, broken and beatified—caught between a mirage and an apocalypse. The theater of it was breathtaking, the bolt of drama. I was fully awake. It was over in ten, maybe fifteen seconds.
I knew him at once.
The scene triggered a memory of a paragraph I’d read twelve years before in mortuary school, from The History of American Funeral Directing, by Robert Habenstein and William Lamers. I have that first edition, by Bulfin Printers of Milwaukee circa 1955.
The paragraph in Chapter III, page 128, at the bottom reads:
A nod should be given to customs that disappeared. Puckle tells of a curious functionary, a sort of male scapegoat called the “sin-eater.” It was believed in some places that by eating a loaf of bread and drinking a bowl of beer over a corpse, and by accepting a six-pence, a man was able to take unto himself the sins of the deceased, whose ghost thereafter would no longer wander.
The “Puckle” referenced was Bertram S. Puckle, a British scholar, whose Funeral Customs, Their Origin and Development would take me another forty years to find and read. But the bit of cinema and the bit of a book had aligned like tumblers of a combination lock clicking into place and opening a vault of language and imagination.
By broaching the notion of substitutionary atonement—that Jesus came to die for our sins, in particular the residual stain of Original Sin that closed the gates of Paradise to us—upon which much of western religiosity rests, the film image of the sin-eater and the Puckle paragraph established a visual and textual alternative to the nearly naked “savior” hanging dead on the cross as the sacrificial lamb of God at the center of the sacred theater of the liturgy I’d grown up with as the child of practicing Catholics. The loaf and bowl consumed over a corpse, the sixpence paid by widow out of her want, the transfer of punishment from sinners to wandering sin-eater rather than a divine “savior,” became the elements of a communion and tithe that fit nicely with my own insidious questioning of the church’s principle faith claims. It fit nicely with my evolving sense that rather than a god in his heaven, it might well be another fellow human who, through offices performed over a corpse, eventually assisted the humans to whom the corpse had mattered. Furthermore, the enterprise of reconciliation and forgiveness was a business conducted among and between fellow humans, often out of their own self-interest, often out of nothing more complex than hunger and thirst.
INTROIBO AD ALTARE DEI is what James Joyce had “stately, plump Buck Mulligan” intone on the opening page of his epic Ulysses, holding a bowl of lather aloft. And years later, reading that book for the first time, Ad deum qui laetificat juventutem meam, still formed in my memory as the cadenced response to the gods who’d given joy to my youth. Irreverence seemed a proper seasoning by then, the grain of salt added to articles of faith.
For all of my mother’s and the priest’s well-intentioned connivances, and though I kept my ears peeled for it, I never ever heard the voice of God. I remember seeing the dead priest’s cassock hanging from a rafter in my grandparents’ basement, a box with his biretta and other priestly things on a shelf beside it. I tried them on but nothing seemed to fit, and over time my life of faith came to include an ambivalence about the church that ranged from passion to indifference—a kind of swithering, brought on, no doubt, by mighty nature—the certain sense awakened in me when I was twelve or thereabouts that among the good lord’s greatest gifts to humankind were the gifts he gave us of each other. Possibly it was meditating on the changes I could see in bodies all around me and sense in my own body, late in my grade-school years, that there were aspects of the priestly life that would be, thanks be to God, impossible for me.
I record these things because they seem somehow the ground and compost out of which Argyle rose, in that flash of recognition years ago, to become the mouthpiece for my mixed religious feelings. If I’d learned sin and guilt and shame and contrition from the nuns and priests, I was likewise schooled in approval and tolerance and inextinguishable love by my parents, earthen vessels though they were. Grace—the unmerited favor of Whoever Is in Charge Here—was the gift outright of my upbringing. It made me, like the apostle the priest I’d been named for was named for, a doubter and contrarian—grateful for religious sensibilities but wary of all magisteriums.
By the end of winter that first year I’d written three or four Argyle poems. I field-tested them at Joe’s Star Lounge on North Main Street in Ann Arbor where boozers and poets would gather on Sunday afternoons to read their latest to one another. It was a kind of communion, I suppose, or potluck anyway: everyone bringing a “dish” to pass, their best home recipes of words. I liked the sound of them in my mouth, the cadence of Argyle’s odd adventures and little blasphemies.
His name came easy, after the socks, of course, the only thing I knew that was reliably Scots, apart from whiskey, and the acoustic resemblance to “our guile,” which sounded a note not far from “guilt,” both notions that attached themselves to his invention.
These were the days long before one could Google up facts on demand, when writers were expected to just make things up out of the whole cloth of imagination: his loneliness, the contempt of locals, the contretemps of clergy—I intuited these, along with the sense of his rootlessness, his orphanage and pilgrimage. I’d spent, by then, enough time in the rural western parishes of Ireland and Scotland to have a sense of the landscapes and people he would find himself among—their “ground sense” and land passions, their religious sensibilities. And the two dozen lines of the first of these poems, each of the lines ranging between nine and a dozen syllables and thus conforming to an imprecise pentameter, seemed perfectly suited to the brief meditations and reliance on numbers and counts that were part of the churchy rubrics: stations of the cross, deadly sins, glorious and sorrowful mysteries, corporal and spiritual works of mercy, the book of hours. Hence this breviary: a couple dozen poems, a couple dozen lines each, a couple dozen photos, about which more anon.
By turns, of course, I began to identify with Argyle. As the only funeral director in a small town in Michigan, I was aware of the ambivalence of human sorts toward anyone who takes on undertakings involving money and corpses, religious practice and residual guilt. Both undertaker and sin-eater know that people in need are glad to see you coming and gladder still to see you gone. Argyle fit my purposes and circumstances. The work to which he had, by force of hunger, been called seemed in concert with my own summons and stumblings both religiously and occupationally. He is trying to keep body and soul together. And these poems articulate the mixed blessing and contrariety of my own life of faith—pre–Vatican II to the Current Disaster. I have been variously devout and devoutly lapsed.
The church of my childhood—the “holy mother” it called itself—has left no few of its children more damaged than doted over, more ignored than nurtured, orphaned and hungry, fed a thin gruel of religiosity rather than the loaves and fishes of spiritual sustenance. The ongoing failure of its management class, its up-line politics and old-boy malfeasances have done remarkable damage to generations of faithful servant priests and faithful people.
Of course, the life of faith is never settled, driven as it must be by doubts and wonder, by those experiences, losses and griefs that cast us adrift, set us to wander the deserts, wrestle with angels. And for Argyle, as for all fellow pilgrims, the tensions between community and marginalization, orthodoxy and apostasy, authority and autonomy, belonging and disbelief, keep him forever second-guessing where he stands with God. In this state of flux we are not alone.
The sin-eater is both appalled by his culture’s religiosity and beholding to it. The accountancy of sin and punishment at once offends him and feeds him. He is caught in the struggle between views of damnation and salvation and the God he imagines as the loving parents he never knew—pure forgiveness, constant understanding, permanent love. He lives in constant hope and fear, despair and faith, gratitude and God hunger. In the end he isn’t certain but believes that everything is forgiven, whomever God is or isn’t, everything is reconciled.
If the English master, W. H. Auden, was correct, and “art is what we do to break bread with the dead,” then the Irish master, Seamus Heaney, was likewise correct when he suggests that “rhyme and meter are the table manners.” Prayer and poetry are both forms of “raised speech” by which we attempt to commune with our makers and creation, with the gone but not forgotten. Argyle’s hunger, his breaking bread upon the dead, is a metaphor for all those rituals and rubrics by which our kind seek to commune with those by whom we are haunted—the ghosts of those gone before us, parents and lovers, mentors and heroes, friends and fellow outcasts, who share with us this sweet humanity, our little moments, the sense we are always trying to make of it in words. His is a sacrament of renewal and restoration. It is in such communion that our hope is nourished—the hope that is signature to our species—that there may be something in nature’s harmonium and hush discernable as the voice of God.
Much the same with icon and image—the things we see in which we might see other things, the hand of God or the hand of man partaking in the same creation. Thus these photographs, taken by my son, Michael, in his many visits to our home in Ireland—the house his great-great-grandfather came out of, the house to which I was the first of our family to return, now more than forty years ago, the house my great-great-grandfather was given as a wedding gift in the decade after the worst of the famines in the middle of the nineteenth century.
When I first went to Ireland—a young man with a high number in the Nixon draft lottery and, therefore, a future stretched out before me—I thought I’d see the forty shades of green. And though I arrived in the off-season, with a one-way ticket, no money or prospects, in a poor county of a poor country, as disappointing a Yank as ever there was, I was welcomed by cousins who could connect me to the photo that hung on their wall of their cousin, a priest, who had died years before. They took me in, put me by the fire, fed me and gave me to believe that I belonged there, I was home. If there is a heaven it might feel like that. In the fullness of time, they left the house to me: a gift, a grace. Everything in those times seemed so black and white—the cattle, the clergy, the stars and dark, right and wrong, love and hate, the edges and borders all well-defined. But now it all seems like shades of gray, shadow and apparition, glimpses only, through the half-light of daybreak and gloaming, mirage and apocalypse, a kind of swithering. And so these photos of home fires and icons, landscapes and interiors, graveyards and coast roads, asses and cattle, statues and stone haunts—all in black and white and shades of gray: like doubt and faith, what may or mayn’t be, what is or isn’t, happenstance or the hand of God.
IN THE END, Argyle is just trying to find his way home, burdened by mighty nature, life’s work and tuitions; he’s looking for a place at a table where he is always welcome and never alone. In the end he is possessed of few certainties or absolutes, his faith always seasoned by wonder and doubt. He knows if there’s a god, it is not him. If there is one, then surely we are all God’s children or none of us are. Either way, the greatest gifts are one another, the greatest sins against each other. To be forgiven, he must forgive everything, because God loves all children or none of them, forgives everything or forgives nothing at all, hears all our prayers or none of them.
At the end, all of his prayers have been reduced to thanks. All of the answers have become you’re welcome.
Our tribe did not read the Bible. We got it in doses, daily or weekly, from a priest bound by the lectionary to give us bits and pieces in Collects, Epistles, Gospels and Graduals, which, along with Confiteor and Kyrie, formed the front-loaded, word-rich portion of the Tridentine Mass. These were followed by sacred table work and common feed, to wit laving and consecration, communion, thanksgiving and benediction. On Sundays, it’d all be seasoned with some lackluster homiletics—linked haphazardly to the scriptures on the day. These liturgies were labor-intensive, heavy on metaphor and stagecraft, holy theater. Possibly this is why few priests put much time into preaching, preferring, as the writing workshops say, “to show rather than to tell.”
Still, we knew the stories: Eden and the apple, the murderous brother, the prodigal son, floods and leviathans, mangers and magi, scribes and Pharisees and repentant thieves. I remember my excitement, the first time I heard about the woman washing the savior’s feet with her tears and wiping them with her long hair and anointing them with perfume. My father, a local undertaker, was especially fond of Joseph of Arimathea and his sidekick, Nicodemus, who’d bargained with Pilate for the corpse of Christ and tended to the burial of same, in Joseph’s own tomb, newly hewn from rock, “in keeping with the customs of the Jews.” My father claimed this “a corporal work of mercy.” This he’d been told by the parish priest, who furthermore gave him what my father called “a standing dispensation,” from attendance at Mass whenever he was called, as he fairly often was, to tend to the dead and the bereaved on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation.
The biblical narratives were told and retold through our formative years at school, by nuns who had done their little bit of editing and elaboration, the better to fit the predicaments of our station. And though we had a Bible at home—an old counter-Reformation, Douay-Rheims translation from the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome’s fourth-century text—we never read the thing. It was a holy knickknack, like the statue of the Blessed Mother, the picture of the Sacred Heart, the tabletop manger scene that came out for Christmas, the crucifixes over each of our bedroom doors, the holy water font at the front door—all designed to suit our daily devotional lives. We prayed the family rosary in May and October, kept the fasts and abstinences of Lent and Advent along with whatever novena was in fashion and most likely to inure to our spiritual betterments. We abstained from meat on Friday, confessed our sins on Saturdays, kept holy the Sabbath, such as we knew it, and basked in the assurance that ours was the one true faith. Ours was a Holy, Roman, Irish-American, postwar-baby-booming, suburban family—sacramental, liturgical, replete with none-too-subtle guilt and shaming, the big magic of transubstantiation, binding and loosing, the true presence, cardinal sins, contrary virtues, states of grace and the hope for salvation. Litanies and chaplets stood in for scriptures and hermeneutics. That was a thing the “other crowd” did, God-help-them, bound to their idolatries about the Good Book, lost, we reckoned, in the error of their ways.
I memorized, through the weekly instructions of Fr. Thomas Kenny, the responses to the priests’ incantations at Mass, attracted as I was to the stately cadences of Latin and the mystery of a secret language. I took up my service as an altar boy at age seven, sharing duties for the 6:20 A.M. Mass with my brothers, Dan and Pat, a year older and younger, respectively, three weeks out of every four, at our parish church, St. Columban’s. Then we’d hustle off to Holy Name School across town where the day’s tutelage began with a students’ Mass at 8:15 read by the saintly, white-maned Monsignor Paddock, beneath a huge mosaic on the general theme, the good sisters told us, of the Eucharist.
Old Melchizedek was on one side and Abraham and Isaac on the other, prefiguring the Risen Christ on his cross occupying the mosaic space between them—each a different version of priesthood, sacrifice and Eucharist. This was the image I stared at all through the mornings of my boyhood, never knowing the chapters or verses I might have read for a more fulsome understanding of it all, how Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son prefigured the death of Jesus on the cross; how the bloody business of worship and communion became the loaf and cup of the Last Supper and the priesthood of Melchizedek became the holy orders of churchmen down through the centuries. Priesthood is something I understood in the cassocked and collared, biretta-topped celibates, the parish priests and curates, Jesuits and Franciscans in their habits who’d heard the voice of God—their vocation—and answered the call.
By twenty I was happily apostate, having come into my disbelief some few years after puberty, when a fellow pilgrim showed me all that she could on the exquisite mysteries of life. If the nuns had been wrong about sex, and they surely had been, it followed, I reasoned, they were wrong on other things.
“Why do you reason about these things in your hearts?” Jesus asks the naysaying elders in Capernaum, in Mark’s telling of the healing of a paralytic. They are trying to catch his blaspheming out, in the way we are always conniving against our spiritual betters.
I’d been named for a dead priest—my father’s late Uncle Tom—and for the famously skeptical apostle, whose finger and dubiety still hover over the wounds of Christ, waiting, in the words of that great evangelist and voodoo economist, Ronald Reagan, to “trust but verify.” True to which code, I questioned everything.
The deaths of innocents, the random little disasters that swept young mothers to their dooms in childbirth, their infants to their sudden crib deaths, young lovers to their demises in cars, perfect strangers to their hapless ends, seemed more evidence than anyone should need that whoever is in charge of these matters had a hit-and-miss record on humanity.
My work—I eventually got about my father’s business—put me in earshot, albeit over corpses, of some of the best preaching on theodicy available. The Book of Job, however god-awful and comfortless it is, remained for me a testament of faith: “Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Nonetheless, I remained devoutly lapsed in my confession and praxis.
So I was fairly shocked when, years later, having achieved the rank of former husband and custodial father, small-town undertaker and internationally ignored poet, I got a call from one of my fellow Rotarians to say they were looking for “a good Catholic to join their Bible study.”
“Let me know if you find one,” is what I answered and we both laughed a little, but he persisted. “No, really, you’ll like it. We’re going to meet at the Big Boy Diner on Tuesday mornings at half past six. We’ll be done by eight so everyone can get to work.” Before I had time to construct a proper excuse he said, “See you then!” and hung up the phone.
What harm, I thought, it’ll never last. A god-awful hour and a crummy eatery, not a great book, if a “good” one—like cocker spaniels, serviceable but ineluctably dull.
That was going on thirty years ago. Our little study has outlived the restaurant, the Rotary, a few of our roughly dozen charter members, our denominations and divided politics, and still we meet—at my funeral home now—every early Tuesday morning, every season, every weather, to read and discuss various books of the Bible. We’ve done everything from Genesis to Revelation, all of the Gospels, some extra-canonical texts, the letters of Paul. Job we’ve done three times, James maybe twice. We’ll likely never do the Apocalypse again.
I only go to church now for baptisms, funerals or weddings. The mysteries of birth and death and sex are regular enough that I count as friends the neighborhood’s clergy, whose personal charities and heroics I’ve been eyewitness to for many years. But dogma and dicta defy sound reason, and the management class of the Church, all churches, seems uniquely wrongheaded and feckless. What’s more, my own views on same-sex marriage, the ordination of women, priestly celibacy and redemptive suffering would put me so sufficiently at odds with them as to render me, no doubt, an ex-communicant.
Oddly enough, the less observant I became, in belief or devotion, the better the “good” book seemed to me. I didn’t need the religious epic so much as a good story, something to share, a party piece.
I can’t remember not knowing about the healing of the paralytic, whether I heard it at Mass or from one of the nuns or Christian Brothers who were in charge of my education or read it as part of our Bible study. There it is, in three Gospels out of four, the details more or less the same. It is one of the three dozen or so miracle stories that punctuate the New Testament, from changing water into wine at Cana, calming the storm and filling the fishnets, to healing of lepers and the blind and lame and raising the dead, himself included. There are endless demons and devils cast out, sins forgiven, apparitions after his death. It was a poem in a book published a few years back that brought it newly to life for me.
The last time I heard Seamus Heaney read was in the Glenn Memorial Chapel at Emory University. It was and remains a Methodist church, which doubles as an auditorium for gatherings of a certain size. It was the 2nd of March of 2013 and I was occupying the McDonald Family Chair, a cushy sinecure with the Candler School of Theology at Emory, teaching a course with the great preacher and theologian Thomas Long on “The Poetics of the Sermon.” Dr. Long and I were just putting the final touches on a book we’d coauthored called The Good Funeral, due out later that year and written for clergy, mere mortals and mortuary sorts. And I was learning words like exegesis and hermeneutics and studying the dynamics of fiction, which Dr. Long regarded as a workable template for homiletics. We examined narrative arc and point of view, plot and character and setting. We read poems and short fictions and published sermons.
I was delighted that Heaney would be coming to town. His had been the most amplified and ever-present voice of my generation of poets. His work, since I first encountered it forty-five years ago, reading by the fire in the ancestral home in County Clare I would later inherit, had never failed to return a rich trove of the word horde and metaphoric treasures. Because so much of his poetry came out of a Catholic upbringing in rural Ireland, he became for me a useful guide for the parish of language and imagination.
Possibly because I first encountered prayer as poetry, or at least as language cast in rhyme and meter, addressed to the heavens as a sort of raised speech, poetry had always seemed sacerdotal, proper for addressing the mysteries of happenstance and creation. That Heaney held the natural world and human work—the chore and toil of the mundane, earthbound and near-to-hand—in awe and reverence, seemed more attuned to the holy than the politicized religiosity of the culture. Still, the Latin I’d learned as an altar boy in the 1950s, the sacraments, devotions and sensibilities I’d been raised with found many echoes in the early poems of the Irish master, even if my own life’s experience and further examinations of scripture and secular texts had left me apostate. Though freighted with doubts and wonders and religiously adrift, I treasured the language of faith as an outright gift—the hymns of Charles Wesley, the angel-wrestling contemplations of John Calvin, the exile and anchoritic adventures of Columcille, and the rubrics of holy women and men—I retained some level of religious literacy given me by nuns and Christian Brothers, but I rejected the magisterium of the church. By the time I’d arrived at Emory in the late winter of 2013, I was deeply devoted to a church of latter-day poets, skeptics and noncompliant but kindly sorts. The irony of such a backslidden fellow as myself teaching at a school of theology named for the Methodist bishop and first chancellor of Emory, whose brother was the owner of our national sugar water, Coca-Cola, was not lost on me. Though I had been schooled in my apostasy by H. L. Mencken, Robert Ingersoll, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, and by the feckless malfeasance of bishops and abusive priests, I had also witnessed, over four decades in funeral service, the everyday heroics of the reverend clergy and their co-religionists. These were men and women of faith who showed up whenever there was trouble. Their best preaching was done when the chips were down, in extremis, at death beds, in the hospitals and nursing homes and family homes and funeral homes. They pitch in and do their part even though they cannot fix the terrible things that happen. They are present, they pray, they keep open the possibility of hope. And I’d been schooled by my semester among the Methodists and seminarians at Emory, and by my friendship with The Reverend Thomas Long, whose scholarship and work in words has re-formed me in a way I thought impossible.
Thus Heaney’s reading from the raised sanctuary of Glenn Memorial Chapel seemed a “keeping holy” of a Sabbath, and his poems, portions of a sacred text. And when he said, deep into what would be one of his last public readings, that he’d like to read some poems from his “last book,” and then corrected himself to say, “my most recent collection . . .” I thought the insertion of the shadow of death was a deft touch by a seasoned performer of his work. It is also true that his “most recent collection,” Human Chain, seemed so haunted a book, dogged by death and impendency and the urgency of last things.
On that day he read one of my favorites of his poems. “Miracle” proposes a shift of focus in the scriptural story of Jesus healing the paralytic, my favorite rendition of which occurs in Mark 2:1–12. Jesus is preaching in Capernaum and the crowd is so great, filling the room and spilling out the door into the street, that four men bringing the paralytic to be healed have to hoist him up to the roof, remove the roof tiles, or dig through the sod and lower him down on his bed by ropes, whereupon Jesus, impressed by their faith, tells the poor cripple his sins are forgiven. Of course, the begrudgers among them—and there are always begrudgers—begin to mumble among themselves about blasphemy, because “Who can forgive sins but God, alone?” Jesus questions them, saying which is easier, by which he means the lesser miracle—“to say, ‘your sins are forgiven’ or to say, ‘Arise, take up your bed and walk’?” It is, of course, a trick question.
Because forgiveness seems impossible, whether to give it or to receive it, and impossible to see. It would always take a miracle. Nor is God the only one capable of forgiving. Do we not pray to be forgiven our trespasses “as we forgive those who trespass against us”? Who among us is not withered and weighed down by the accrual of actual or imagined slights, betrayals, resentments, estrangements and wrongdoings done unto us most often by someone we’ve loved. And in ways I needn’t number, we’re all paralyzed, hobbled by our grievances and heartbreaks, by the press of sin, the failure of vision, by fear, by worry, by anxieties about the end.
Whereas the scripture directs our attention to the paralytic, and to the quibbles between Jesus and the scribes, Heaney’s poem bids us be mindful of the less-learned toil and utterly miraculous decency of “the ones who have known [us] all along,” who lift us up, bear us in our brokenness, and get us where we need to go. On any given day it seems miracle enough.
The everyday and deeply human miracle, void of heavenly hosts or interventions, has special meaning for Heaney who, in August of 2006, woke up in a guest house in Donegal paralyzed by a stroke. He had attended the birthday party for Anne Friel, wife of the playwright and Heaney’s schoolmate and lifelong friend, Brian Friel. After the night’s festivities the Heaneys were spending the night with other friends and fellow poets in the local B&B. He awakened to paralysis on the left side of his body. So it was his wife, Marie, and Des and Mary Kavanagh, Peter and Jean Fallon and Tom Kilroy—ones who had known him all along—who helped strap him onto the gurney and get him down the steep stairs, out of the building and into the waiting ambulance to ride with his wife to Letterkenny Hospital. In the poem, which took shape in the weeks of what he called “rest cure” in the Royal Hospital, Donnybrook, in Dublin, the narrative power proceeds not to “the one who takes up his bed and walks,” rather to “the ones who have known him all along and carry him in—” who do the heavy lifting of his care and transport. They are the agents of rescue and restoration, their faithful friendship miraculous and salvific. Their hefting and lifting and large muscle work is the stuff and substance of salvation. Here is the short poem.
MIRACLE
Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
And carry him in—
Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked
In their backs, the stretcher handles
Slippery with sweat. And no let-up
Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable
and raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait
For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those ones who had known him all along.
This language of shoulders, aching backs and waiting for the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool honors the hands-on, whole-body habits of human labor that the poet learned as a farm boy in Derry. From comparing his father’s spade work in the turf bog to his own excavations in meaning and language in his poem “Digging,” to the town and country indentures of blacksmithing, well-gazing and kite-flying at the end of Human Chain, Heaney’s work upholds the holiness of human labor and the sacred nature of the near-to-hand.
Hearing its maker read “Miracle” from the pulpit at Emory put me in mind of my conversation with him at the funeral of our friend Dennis O’Driscoll, who had died less than three months before, on Christmas Eve, 2012, and was buried near his home in Naas, County Kildare.
Seamus had been Dennis’s principal eulogist on the day, just as Dennis had been Heaney’s most insightful interlocutor. His book of interviews with Heaney, Stepping Stones, is the nearest thing to an autobiography we will ever have of the Nobel Laureate and more thoroughly than ever examines the life of the man in relation to the work.
Following O’Driscoll’s funeral liturgy, I walked with Heaney and his wife in the sad cortege from the church to the cemetery, half a mile or so, following the coffin and the other mourners. We chatted about our dead friend and the sadness we all shared. Maybe his stroke six years before and my open-heart surgery the year before eventuated in our bringing up the rear of the entourage. We were taking our time, huffing and puffing some at the steeper bits, as we made our slow but steady way up the town, out the road, to the grave behind the hearse. In Ireland the dead are shouldered to the opened ground and lowered in with ropes by the pallbearers. After the priest has had his say, the grave is filled in by family and friends. The miracle of life and the mystery of death are unambiguously tethered by a funiculus of grave ropes and public grieving, religiously bound by the exercise of large muscle duties—shoulder and shovel work and the heart’s indentures, each a linkage in the ongoing, unbroken human chain. And the strain of pallbearers at O’Driscoll’s open grave, as they lowered his coffined body into the opened ground with slowly paying out the ropes, seemed like the faithful and existential labor of the paralytic’s friends, lowering his bed through the opened roof in Capernaum to the foot of his healer for a cure.
The witness of these things drew a catch in my breath, that New Year’s Eve morning when we buried Dennis O’Driscoll, in the new row of St. Corban’s Cemetery. Watching his pallbearers lower him into the vacancy of the grave, these mundane mortuary chores replicating the miraculous narrative of the Gospels where the paralytic’s pals lower him into the place of his healing, the “slight lightheadedness and incredulity” perfectly articulated in Heaney’s poem, remains caught in my chest, not yet exhaled, and like the scribes in Capernaum, that day in Naas, though I’d seen such things all my workaday life, I’d “never seen anything like this before.”
And yet I saw it all again, months later in the late summer when Heaney’s death stunned us all on Friday morning, the 30th of August, 2013. I woke to texts and emails from Dublin. “Seamus is dead,” is what they read. “Ah, hell . . .” I wrote back. Ah, hell, indeed.
I called David Fanagan, the Dublin undertaker, and asked if I might ride in the hearse. Someone who knew the poems and the poet should ride along.
I flew to Shannon and stayed at my digs in Clare that night and drove up to Dublin on Sunday morning, stopping in Naas to visit Dennis’s grave. At Fanagan’s in Aungier Street, Heaney was laid out in Chapel 3, the corpse, horizontal and still, “silent beyond silence listened for.” Marie greeted me and thanked me for making the long journey and was a little shocked to hear that I’d had my ticket in hand for more than a month, long before Seamus had any notion of dying. She told me she thought he must have had a heart attack on Wednesday, complaining of a pain in his jaw, then tripped leaving a restaurant on Thursday which got him to the hospital where they discovered a tear in his aorta. The only thing riskier than operating, she was told, was doing nothing. He was in extremis. A team was assembled to do the procedure at half past seven on Friday morning, just minutes before which he texted her, calm and grateful for the long years of love, and told her not to be afraid. “Noli timere,” he wrote at the end, the ancient language Englished: be not afraid. He was dead before the operation began.
All the way up there people lined the way, on the overpasses, and in the halted cars at intersections where they got out of their cars to applaud the cortege of the great poet. Women were weeping or wiping tears from their faces. Men held the palms of their hands to their hearts, caps doffed, thumbs up, everyone at their best attention.
“How did you get to be the one?” I asked the man at the wheel of the new Mercedes Benz hearse, no doubt hustled into service for the television cameras. “I drew the short straw,” he told me. “We used to get extra to drive in the North, what with the Troubles and fanatics. Now it’s just a long haul and a long day.”
We picked up forty or fifty cars as we made our way, the roughly three-hour drive north from Dublin, then west around Belfast making for Derry, crossing the river that connects Lough Beg to Lough Neagh at Toomebridge, the crowds getting bigger the nearer we got. Police on motorcycles picked us up at the border, just outside of Newry, and escorted our makeshift motorcade all the way to the cemetery as we went down the boreen off the main road and drove by the family farm and onwards to Bellaghy, where a piper met us at the entrance to town and piped us through the village where the crowd spilled out of shops and pubs and houses and into the road, every man woman and child out applauding, crossing themselves, giving out with bits of “Danny Boy” and holding their hearts in signals of respect. The sadness on their faces and the tribute to the level man behind me in the box was like nothing I’d ever seen, and when we got to the grave, led there by a cadre of churchmen in white albs and copes and cowls, I took the family spray up to the grave through the cordons of paparazzi clicking photos of everything. I walked with Marie and her family behind the coffin as we went to the grave, where against my hopes that Seamus would pop out and proclaim it all a big mistake, his sons and his brothers and her brothers bent to the black ropes and lowered him into the ground, the paid-out ropes and the burn in their arms and hands and the hush of the gathered multitude notwithstanding. Leaves rustled in the overarching sycamores. The clergy struck up a verse of “Salve Regina” to re-insinuate their imprimatur on it all. We hung around in that sad and self-congratulatory way mourners do, after the heavy lifting is done. The limo had a slow leak in the right front tire that had to be tended to. Des Kavanaugh and his wife, Mary, came and spoke to me wondering if I’d be in Galway anytime soon. Brian Friel’s car pulled away; he nodded. Michael, Seamus’s son, came over to thank me for going in the hearse with his dad and I was glad of that. And grateful. I stayed until the sod was back on him, and the flowers sorted on top of that and then we drove back the road, arriving in Dublin right around dark. Anthony MacDonald, his short-straw, long day nearing its end, dropped me at the corner of Georges Street and Stephen Street Lower. I gave him fifty euros and told him to get something at the off license with my thanks for taking me up and back on the day, for getting Seamus where he needed to go, and for getting me where I needed to be. “No bother,” he said. “Not a bit.” Nothing out of the utterly ordinary, utterly pedestrian, a miracle.
Possibly these are the miracles we fail to see, on the lookout as we are for signs and wonders: for seas that part for us to pass through, skies that open to a glimpse of heaven, the paralytic who stands and walks, the blind who begin to see, the shortfall that becomes a sudden abundance. Maybe what we miss are the ordinary miracles, the ones who have known us all along—the family and friends, the fellow pilgrims who show up, pitch in and do their parts to get us where we need to go, within earshot and arms’ reach of our healing, the earthbound, everyday miracle of forbearance and forgiveness, the help in dark times to light the way, the ones who turn up when there is trouble to save us from our hobbled, heart-wrecked selves.
My old dog Bill will be dead by Easter. God knows, he should have been dead before now. The now of which I write—the moment to hand—is that no-man’s-land of days between Christmas, New Year’s and the Epiphany. I’ve gone beyond fashionably late with this essay, which I promised for the twelfth day of the twelfth month of the last year—an essay on Easter with an Advent delivery. I’ve promised it now for Little Christmas, hoping that like the magi of old, I’ll come to see things as they are.
A member of the reverend clergy told me that the formula old preachers used to prepare their homiletics included three points and a poem. Montaigne would string his essays on a filigree of Latin poets. He worked in his library and when stuck for some leap into a fresh paragraph, he’d often quote Virgil or Catullus or Lucan and carry on as if the poem were an aperitif readying the reader for another course.
Which puts me in mind of the twelve days of Christmas I spent downstate being paterfamilias for our yuletide observations. This poem came into being in contemplation of a carol we always sing this time of year.
TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS
Some pilgrims claim the carol is a code
for true believers and their catechists,
to wit: four colly birds, four gospel texts,
eight maids a milking, the beatitudes,
and pipers piping, the eleven left
once Judas had betrayed the lamb of God—
that partridge in a pear tree, the holy one
and only whose nativity becomes
in just a dozen days the starlit eve
of three French hens with their epiphanies
huddled round the family in the manger,
tendering their gold and frankincense and myrrh.
The whole tune seems to turn on “five gold rings”—
the Pentateuch, those first books of the Torah
in which ten lords a leaping stand in for
the ten commandments cut in loaves of stone
which Moses broke over his wayward tribesmen.
Two turtle doves, two testaments, old and new.
Six geese a laying, creation’s shortened week,
the swimming swans, gifts of the Holy Ghost
whose fruits become withal nine ladies dancing.
Twelve drummers drumming, the Apostle’s Creed:
a dozen doctrines to profess belief in.
Still, others say it’s only meant to praise
fine feathered birds and characters and rings,
our singing nothing more than thanksgiving
for litanies of underserved grace,
unnumbered blessings, the light’s increasing,
our brightly festooned trees bedazzling.
Montaigne, the father of all essayists, himself a sort of preacher, to four centuries of readers and counting, was anxious to understand the human being and condition. It was, thanks be, his lifelong study. In his marvelous essay, “Of Repentance,” a Lenten read and Easter anthem, he wrote in French a point that Englishes as In every man is the whole of man’s estate, by which he meant we are all at once the same but different; to know the species, know a specimen. To understand the Risen Christ we’d better reckon with the wounds and miracles, betrayals and agonies. Study the scriptures and the poems.
The men in my Bible study took the day after Christmas off last week, but we met for the day after New Year’s today, in the early morning dark at the funeral home, as we have been doing now for years. The price is right, the coffee’s free, it’s quiet in the early o’clock. Except for the ones gone to their time-shares in Florida, or the ones homebound with the seasonable woo, the turnout is a good one and we’re glad to have survived into another year. We’re reading from the 24th Chapter of Matthew when Jesus is giving the disciples a list of the signs that the end times are nearing. Wars and rumors of wars, false prophets, nation rising up against nation, earthquakes and famines in various places.
The sky has been falling throughout most of history. And for everyone predicting doom, the doom is certain. Whether we die en masse, in cataclysms of natural or supernatural origin, we die in fact, one hundred percent.
Possibly this is why one of us eases the talk around to declaring a win in the War on Christmas, reporting that people are saying “Merry Christmas” again in a way that political correctness prevented up until now. Another fellow heartily agrees. I mention that the War on Christmas was invented by a cable-news host to divert attention from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq which were coming, alas too late, under scrutiny in the middle naughts. I suggest they go home and Google Barack Obama and Merry Christmas. And I wonder aloud, it being the feast of the Octave of Christmas which used to be observed in the Christian calendar, the Circumcision of Jesus, why these old white male and much-aggrieved Christians weren’t willing to serve in the War on Circumcision. Why should we wish each other Happy New Year when Happy Circumcision is the more Christian, more religious greeting? They tilt their heads at what I am saying the way that Bill does when he hears an oddly pitched noise. But I digress. I was trying to relate Easter to Bill’s slow demise. This is not about birth and circumcision and magi, rather betrayal, passion, death and burial, and then the Easter we claim to believe in.
HE’S LIVED WELL past the expectations—Bill, the dog—half again beyond his “use by” date. These latter days have all been bonus time and have taught me gratitude in the stead of the “poor me’s” and the “why me’s” and the “give me’s,” which have always seemed my usual nature. I’m easily beset by resentments and begrudgeries—a character flaw from which I’ve achieved irregular remissions over the years, occasional dispensations. I’m living through one such dispensation now, watching old Bill in his withering and bewilderments as the mightiness of his shoulders and hindquarters, the deep menace of his guardian bark, and the fathomless pools of his big brown eyes have given way to lame waltzing on his “last legs,” a kind of castrato’s cough at threats he senses but cannot see through a cloud of cataracts, nor hear in the dull chambers of lost itching ears. His nose still works its cold damp magic. He finds his food and good places to squat to the duties of his toilet. His soft black curls of fur are full of dander and dry skin beneath despite the designer mash of essential oils and my wife’s tender correctives. So long as he eats and craps and can be medicated against the pain, I won’t exercise the lethal dominion over him I wish I did not have. Yes, dead by Easter I’d wager, or sooner, much sooner, as the gyre of demise works its tightening, ineluctable damage.
Back when I was researching his breed, the Bernese mountain dog, or as I joked when he was a puppy, “an AKC Registered Pain in the Ass,” the Wikipedia on my old laptop promised six to eight years of life expectancy for dogs of his prodigious size. All to the good, I remember thinking, at least I’ll outlive him. I was fifty-seven years old that late winter I got him, now twelve years ago. I was well into my last trimester of being. My father, my grandfathers, the men in my line had all died in their sixties, of broken hearts: a bad valve, clogged arteries, congestive heart failure, some embolism—quick, convincing “failures,” or “attacks,” or “infarctions.”
Bill’s gone half again older than we expected. And even that might have been a miscalculation. My wife never really wanted a dog. After the kids were grown and gone and out on their own on automatic pilot, throwing in with partners of the same species, taking mortgages, signing leases, making plans and car payments, after we breathed the sigh of relief that they all seemed poised and provisioned to outlive us, Mary settled in with Law and Order reruns and I kept to my old customs of splitting my time between the day job undertaking and the preoccupation with language, writing and words.
I remember sitting with her one Sunday afternoon, watching the episode where Lennie and his estranged daughter, Kathy, meet up for lunch—she keeps her distance because of his drinking and the two failed marriages, one to her mother. The episode, “Aftershock,” involves Lennie and Ray Curtis, his young partner, along with Jack McCoy and Claire Kinkaid, the legal team, witnessing an execution of someone they put away. Lennie’s life was always complex. And I was thinking what a good thing a dog would be to get me out of the house and walking on a regular basis and I said, on one of the commercial breaks, “What would you think about my getting a dog?”
“Are you out of your (expletive deleted) mind?” she responded. “Finally we have the place to ourselves, we come and go as we please, we’ve got some peace and quiet and you want a dog!” I took this to mean she didn’t want one.
IN THOSE DAYS I would occasionally write a poem that borrowed from a famous poem for the kernel of creation that brought it into being. This is how I’d come to write a poem called “Corpses Do Not Fret Their Coffin Boards,” which borrowed unabashedly from William Wordsworth’s sonnet “Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room,” which I’d encountered that morning, possibly on the radio, listening to the voice of Garrison Keillor, who used to do “The Writers’ Almanac,” a five-minute diamond of daily bits and pieces that ended with the reading of a poem. Wordsworth’s sonnet is in praise of sonnets, in observation of the truth revealed to him, some centuries back, that formal constraints—“the narrow room”—often produce an unpredictable freedom. The sonneteer knows all too well that the work in words to make a sonnet is but fourteen lines of ten or so syllables, organized to rhyme in some predetermined way—a code that poets map out as AABB or ABAB or maybe, as Wordsworth did for his wee sonnet, ABBA, with the twist that the sound of A in lines one and four repeats itself in lines five and eight. There are other embellishments of sound and sense to bring it to an end in line fourteen, but what I can say is that one comes to the close of a sonnet with a sense that it must have been a loving God that brought old Wordsworth into being to speak to me years after his demise in a different century, millennium and nation.
WORDSWORTH AFFIRMS THE snug hugging and liberation of the sonnet’s terms in the last half of his, to wit:
In truth the prison, into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.
My own sonnet, while crediting Wordsworth, albeit sub-titularly, has less to do with space and nature than with time and money, preoccupations of my advancing years.
CORPSES DO NOT FRET THEIR COFFIN BOARDS
after Wordsworth
Corpses do not fret their coffin boards,
nor bodies wound in love their narrow beds:
size matters less to lovers and the dead
than to the lonely and the self-absorbed
for whom each passing moment is a chore
and space but vacancy: unholy dread
of what might happen or not happen next;
this dull predicament of less or more’s
a never balanced book, whereas for me,
the worth of words is something I can count
out easily, on fingertips—the sounds
they make, the sense, their coins and currencies—
these denouements doled out in tens, fourteens:
last reckonings tapped out on all accounts.
Fresh from its typing, this is the page I posted to the fridge with a kitchen magnet back in the day before stainless-steel appliances made magnets redundant, the better for my missus to see it in her own good time and possibly ink some edits in as marginalia. I loved it when she read my poems and commented for better or worse because it sang to me a song of hope beyond the everyday desolation of long consortium, often marked by romantic indifference and connubial blahs in the stead of bliss.
But days after I’d posted the draft, alas, no corrections or comments had appeared. No cross-outs or smiley faces, no affirmations scribbled in passing, no nothing.
It was another Sunday afternoon when, being as I am a man of habits, I said into the general silence of the day that was in it, “What would you think about my getting a dog?” To which she replied without enthusiasm, “Maybe you could name it Wordsworth.”
My heart leaped inside my bosom. I couldn’t believe my ears. What meaning ought I to take from this expletive-free and contingent utterance? Surely, it seemed, she had read my poem, or at least the title and citation line. Was this some signal of approval, some sign that my efforts had not been for naught? At the very least it was not disapproval, no rhetorical about the state of my (formerly expletive-ridden) mind. No, this was, if not full-throated approval, a willingness to consider the prospect, a nod toward tolerance if not the full embrace of the notion. I moved immediately into my office, where my computer, ever at the ready, soon had me Googling for “Bernese Mountain Dogs, Michigan.” Two days later I was driving up the highway with my middle son to mid-Michigan where a man claimed to be weaning a recent litter.
“What about ‘No!’ didn’t you understand?” she said, when I brought the puppy in the door. “But honey,” I coaxed her, “we can call him Wordsworth! Just like you said. William Wordsworth.”
“Let’s just make it ‘Bill W.,’ ” she said, insinuating the name of the founder of the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, a fellowship to which we both belonged. Was she insinuating that the puppy might shake the serenity that our long sobriety had produced?
It is hard to know, but “Bill” it has been ever since—from the eleven-pound puppy he was that Ash Wednesday of 2006, that first of March I brought him through the door on the day of my only daughter’s birthday, to the hundred-and-ten-pound giant of kindliness he in time became, to the withering, arthritic, ninety-some-pound geriatric pooch snoring on the floor next to my shoes as I type these truths into the computer.
In the twelve years since, so much has happened. If I take stock, it is an inventory of losses. My daughter, now in her middle years, has disconnected from her family. She is estranged from her mother, my first wife, and from me, her stepmother, her brothers and her brothers’ families, her aunts and uncles and cousins, everyone from her family of origin. In the email asking us to keep our distance and not to initiate any contact with her, she said she was going out west for therapy to treat what she called her codependence. She said that she felt that she never got enough time as a child, that she had to grow up too soon, what with the divorce between her mother and me when she was nine and ten years old. I wrote back saying that such insights were hard got and that I supported her eagerness to get right with herself and would follow her directives and stood ready to assist in any way I might do her some good in her efforts. Except for the occasional text message to wish happy birthdays or best for holidays, we’ve had no substantial communication since. Her family of choice, near as I can figure, includes her husband, her horse, her dog, some friends? Before this happened, I spent two years in weekly therapy with her in an effort to discern what might be done to let this cup pass. The shrink thought we’d arrived at a plan for what to do to keep us in each other’s futures. But soon after that, my daughter wrote to say her well-being required that she keep her distance from us all. I said I wanted her to be well. It feels like a death without any of the comforting, buffering infrastructure of mortality—a known cause and certification, a ceremony, a grave, a place I can go and weep. There’s none of that. Her absence, her choice of absence, her riddance of us all is everywhere. On holidays and birthdays there’s a text that comes more or less as a proof of life. For years it seemed I was left with a choice between assigning this sadness to evil or mental illness. I chose the latter. There is no succor in it.
Whether this grief is coincident with, correlated to, or the cause of our lackluster marriage—the second one, or maybe the first—I do not know. But what I do know is we’ve lost our way. We live, for the most part, separate lives and have slowly ceased to share our lives, our dreams, our meals, our bed, our whereabouts, our hopes and fears, our plans for the future. The desolation is as palpable as our bliss once seemed. All of this after many years of joyous intimacy, shared purpose, real partnership makes it more the pity that we both live now like widowed people, bereft of a spouse that, though still alive, is gone from us in measurable ways. We share bank accounts and an estate plan and rise to the occasion for holidays, but otherwise are in every meaningful way alone, and what has grown between us is what Heaney called a “silence beyond silence listened for.” It seems I’ve ended up like Lennie Briscoe—a two-time loser at marriage, estranged from a daughter who chooses to remain out of contact with or from her family of origin. We text our affections or proclaim them to anyone within earshot, but it makes no difference. When I compare my lot to men I’ve buried, whose flaws and imperfections seemed amplified compared to mine, and yet whose wives still went along for the ride, whose daughters doted on them till the end, like a hurt dog howling at the emptiness, I shake a fist in the face of the God I don’t quite believe in anymore.
The poor-me and why-me lamentations, variations on the Book of Job, leave me with a choice between hurt and anger. I tend toward the latter and fear the worst. I keep working the program, the fellowship and twelve steps of AA, because it keeps me from adding a class-A depressant to the gathering sadness, the tears of things. I do not want to live in fear.
MY PAL GEORGE is what we call a “sponsor”—someone in the fellowship to reach out to when the ways of things threaten to overwhelm. He’s been sober longer than anyone I know. And he’s bookish and very well educated: he’s a JD and a CPA, and for a good few of my books, he was the proofreader I sent the roughest of drafts to. He’d fix the spelling and punctuation and errors of thought and construction. We’ve been friends and neighbors for decades now. For years he’s been losing his short-term memory. The arc of his infirmity has been slow but steady. Dithering gave way to a sort of discombobulation, which in time gave way to chronic disorientation, which became what seems now a cruel advancing dementia. Beyond the indignities of age, his condition rightly frightened his family. They got him into assisted living. Attendant nurses see to his meds and meals. There are bingo nights and socials. I call and visit when I can. I live upstate now three weeks out of four, at a lake house with Bill for whom the remove and the quiet are like balms. He doesn’t have young suburbanites to bark at out the windows as they stroll by with their toddlers, infants and designer dogs. Downstate, my wife occupies the house next to the funeral home where I lived for forty- five years and into which she moved, when my sons and daughters were school children or teenagers and I was the family court’s designee as the “more fit” custodial parent—all of us hobbled some by the end of the marriage that brought them into being.
I CALL GEORGE a couple times a week to see how he’s doing. When I asked him how he was adjusting to living there, he told me what I guess I needed to hear.
“I’m doing fine,” he said. “You can’t be angry all the time.” It makes me believe in a loving God when deep in my resentments about living alone, I hear my sponsor, though addled and beset, bewildered really and yet making perfect sense to me. Good to have just such a sponsor. You can tell him anything and he’ll likely forget. Sometimes I think it might be a gift except when I see the thousand-yard stare he sometimes gets, like combat soldiers who have seen too much, or keep getting a glimpse of what they can’t remember anymore. I took him to the movies a couple months ago. We saw Dunkirk, ate popcorn and Milk Duds. It was fun. On the way out of the theater he quoted some lines from Churchill’s speech to Parliament regarding Dunkirk: “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender”—something he’d remembered from his lifelong studies and erudition. By the time I dropped him back at his quarters in the care facility, he could not remember what movie we’d seen.
Surrender’s a big part of staying sober. “Let go,” we alkies often say, “let God.” LG, LG! Or “not our day to watch it,” meaning we are not in charge. It’s why I address my supplications to Whomever’s In Charge Here, because the article of faith I hold to is provisional, to wit, if there’s a God, it isn’t me. The fellowship has ruined my religious certainty—that One True Faith-ism we all are raised with. But the fellowship of wounded, variously damaged goods who’ve shared their experience, strength and hopes with me have illumined for me, however dimly, a life of faith. It’s made me wary of certainty and open to hopes and loves I never before imagined. It’s made me grateful and rheumy eyed so that I find myself weeping at the ways of things. De Rerum Natura, Lucretius called it—the glimpses of godliness we sometimes get in the otherwise quotidian, dull happenstance of life. Lucretius was a disbeliever, whereas I’m a happy ignoramus—in either case, we do not know.
The things George still remembers best are often things that happened years ago, like the woman who told him at his mother’s funeral how his mother “understood life’s higher callings.” He remembers that as the high praise it was of a woman who took to heart the hardships of others and did what she could to make their situations better. I tell him I think he has that too, an understanding of life’s higher callings, how he’s been a source for me of good orderly direction, if not the voice of God, at least a goodness in him that is undeniable. He looks out the window at the birds in the snow—chickadees and nuthatches, titmice and a cardinal—and asks if I believe it means an angel is near, to see a bright red cardinal in the chill of winter. Perhaps, I tell him, it’s his mother, or mine. He looks away; I’m getting rheumy eyed.
I had Bill’s grave dug two years ago, fearful as I was of getting caught by frost deep in the ground, with a dead dog on my hands in Michigan’s winter. And I started collecting the soup bones, littered everywhere over the yard, which he had worked the marrow out of over the years. It got to where I’d have them custom cut at the butchers, a few dozen at a time. I found a couple hundred of them and strung them on a line of rope and wound some solar-powered lights around the rope and hung the whole assemblage from the fulcrum that overhangs the water’s edge and by which the former tenants’ dock was swung out into place each spring. The bone rosary is what I call it, this blinking string of bones and lights that’s meant to mark the spot where Bill will be interred sometime in the coming spring, I reckon, when his age and infirmity come to the certain end all living things come to. I’ve even written a brief lament and asked my son to have it cast in bronze so I can bolt it to a stone over his grave.
LITTLE ELEGY
for a dog who skipped out, and after XJ Kennedy
Here lies loyal, trusted, true
friend for life, Bill W.,
named for Wordsworth and the guy
by whose twelve steps I’ve stayed dry,
like the good dog buried here
who could bark but never bit;
never strayed too far or shit
indoors; never fell from grace.
God, grant him this ground, this grave,
out of harm’s way, ceaseless rest.
Of all good dogs old Bill was best.
They laugh at me, of course, my sons, for all the planning for Bill’s demise—the hole at the corner of the lot, the rosary of bones blinking in the dark over the water’s edge, the stone, the little poem. Preparing for Bill’s death they figure is a way of preparing for my own or diverting my attention from fears about what lies ahead, in the way that Easter has, for true believers, been a blessed assurance of eternal life, a contingent balm, in its alternate narrative, in the gaping maw of mortality.
I’ve a friend who says we’ve lost our “eschatological nerve,” the certainty that heaven awaits the good and perdition the evil doers. With the loss of a sense of eternal reward or damnation producing justice in a world so often unfair, we’ve begun to uphold the so-called prosperity gospel, to wit, success is a sign of God’s favor, as if grace was deserved or earned like the poverty the poor are said to have coming to them. The good news formerly proclaimed by the evangels has been replaced by their enthusiasm for Donald Trump and his zero-sum, winners and losers agenda.
This year Easter falls on April Fools’. Some feasts are moveable, some steadfast. It’ll also be, if my friend George remains, as he has since April 1st, 1974, quit of the booze that made him crazy, his forty-fourth AA birthday, proving, as he often says, that any fool can get sober if he or she works the program. Whether March Madness or April Fools’, Easter is for those who believe in second acts and second chances, another go, mulligans and do-overs. Easter is for repentance and forgiveness, amends and abundant life. Easter is when the lost are found and the dead arise, transfigured, glorified by what is possible. The Easter I believed in as a boy was a sort of zombie apocalypse. It never mattered much to me whether Jesus was really raised from the dead. Like Lennie Briscoe I was damaged at the specter of the capital punishment. The broken, bloody body of the Christ that hung center stage in Catholic churches was more a spectacle to me than narrative. Perhaps that’s sacrilege. Perhaps not. Nor have I much interest in whether the Moral Influence or Substitutionary Atonement models of redemption most apply. My faith in a loving God, keeping a count of the hairs on my head, comes and goes with changing realities. It is as if I blame every outrage, every evil not averted, every sadness that might have been undone, on the God I hardly believe in anymore. Some days I see the hand or hear the voice of God implicated in the things that happen; others not so much. Begrudgery and resentment are the crosses I bear, and I find them much heavier than just giving thanks. This Easter I’m not looking for an empty tomb, triumphant savior or life eternal. Rather, some spiritual progress, instead of perfection; a little repair if not redemption, some salvage south of full salvation. “No appointments,” an old-timer used to tell me, “no disappointments.” No expectations, no vexations.
Truth told I see sufficient triumph in the way that Bill still makes the climb upstairs at night, despite his sore hips, cloudy eyes, and the withered muscle mass in his shoulders and hindquarters. It comes with age. Is he driven by loyalty or an old fear of sleeping alone? Is it love or fear of loss? Impossible to know. He carries on but does not speak.
I see an Easter in George’s getting through another day of his assisted but nonetheless bewildered living, in good humor though utterly out of sorts. I sense it in the texts I get from my long-estranged daughter, those proofs of life; the flickering of tenderness I still feel toward my distant wife, our genial courtesies.
The meeting I go to on Sunday nights up at the lake is in the basement of Transfiguration Church. And that’s what I’m after this Easter, I think. That’s what I’m after most of the time, the momentary radiance of the divine beaming out of God’s creation. Old dogs can do it, old friends, old wives; old sorrows borne patiently, old grievances forgiven, old connections restored.
New ones too, like the other night at the meeting when Lilah was talking. She’s the youngest pilgrim at the table. She’s paid her dues and is working on sobriety. She’s talking about how she came to know that she was beloved, when her girlfriend, noticing how badly sunburned Lilah got when they were gardening one August afternoon last summer, did not scold. Rather, she carefully peeled the dry shreds of skin off Lilah’s reddened shoulder, bent and tenderly kissed the spot, and held the desiccated remnants of her darling’s flesh in the palm of her hand, like viaticum, a sort of holy grail that she brought to her mouth, ate and swallowed.
Her sharing this intimacy and its intelligence quickened my breath and then caught it up. Gobsmacked is what I was, my mouth agape as if trying to hold my breath and let it go. My eyes were getting red and rheumy yet again, welling with a glimpse of the divine, the beautiful, the redeemed and atoned for, manifestly forgiven beings, all of us assembled around the table, we had shown up broken and bewildered and disconnected and were suddenly beatified, illumined and made new, transfigured in the shimmering moment; my catching breaths were shortening and I was fearless suddenly, cavalier about the scene I was on the brink of making.
It was then I was remembering that Jesus wept.
Some Thoughts on Uteri, on Wombs
The contemplation of the womb, like staring into the starlit heavens, fills me with imaginings of Somethingness or Nothingness. It was ever thus. If space is the final frontier, the womb is the first one—that place where, to borrow Wallace Stevens’s phrase, the idea of the thing becomes the thing itself. It is the tabernacle of our expectations. The seedbed and safe harbor whence we launch, first home and habitat, the garden of delight’s denouement. A place where the temps are set, the rent is easy, the food is good and we aren’t bothered by telephone or tax man. That space we are born out of, into the world, where the soft iambics of our mother’s heart become the first sure verses of our being, the first poetry of our life, Cavafy said. “Sometimes they speak to us in our dreams; sometimes in thought the mind hears them . . . like distant music that dies off in the night.”
When I first beheld, as a student in mortuary school, Plates 60 and 61 in Book Five of De humani corporis fabrica libri septum (The Fabric of the Human Body) by the great sixteenth-century physician and anatomist, Andreas Vesalius, I was smitten with ontological and existential awe. A disciple of the first-century Greek philosopher and medico, Galen of Pergamon, one sees in the Belgian’s handiwork the male gaze on female parts he examines at autopsy and vivisection. There is such tenderness in the splayed cavity and skinned breast of the headless woman of his scrutiny, such precision to his illustrations of her innards.
By then I’d had a rudimentary acquaintance with the bodies of women. I knew what to touch and rub, fondle and savor, hug and hold, loosen and let go, lave and graze. But the frank exposure of the human fabric that Vesalius’s images detailed were wondrous to me, unveiling as they do, apocalyptically, the beauty of both form and function. Had I not found his drawings so sumptuously instructive—corresponding as they did to the focus of my own gobsmacked gaze—I might have considered then what I consider now, here in my age and anecdotage, to wit, the notion that, though each gender has its own specific parts to play in our species’ drama of “reproduction,” such issues are neither male nor female solely. Rather, they are human in scope and nature, requiring, in both meaning and performance, the two it always takes to tango. We are, it turns out, in this together.
Still, it is impossible to behold a woman’s parts without gratitude and awe. Likewise I am often chuffed—a word that means both one thing and its opposite—by the sense such encounters invariably include that we are all, in fact, the same but different; the anatomists’ renderings of our private parts show the male member is nothing so much as a vagina turned inside out, so that the adventitia, smooth muscle and mucosa of the latter reflect, actually, the phallic urgency of the former, almost as if they were made for each other, bespoke, custom fit—like sword to scabbard, hand to glove, preacher to pulpit or corpse to opened ground.
And, lest any man assume the sword more salient than the scabbard, consider science, that great leveler:
In utero, we all start as female and only the random happenstance of the Y chromosome and its attendant hormones makes some of us male. Still, testes are unambiguously fallen ovaries and the scrotal raphe a labial scar from the fusion of one’s formerly female lips. The penis is a clitoris writ large, the nipples sans lactating, ornaments for men to remind them of the truth they are mostly boobs that do not work. So, whether penetration, ejaculation, ovulation, uterine contraction, fertilization or gestation seals the reproductive deal, each is essential to this essential mystery, we are brought into being by the fervent collaboration of both male and female. Science provides stand-ins for the stallion and sire. “They bring the bull in a suitcase, now,” my cousin Nora in West Clare informed me years ago, speaking of her small troupe of milking Friesians, which had a withering effect on my rampant mannishness. Men are easily made redundant, but female mammals still do the heavy bearing. Far from the second, weaker sex, the female seems the first and fiercest, like poetry to language, the one without which nothing happens.
I WENT FOR stillborn babies, as a boy. Well not a boy, exactly, but not yet a man. My apprenticeship to my father’s business meant I’d go to hospitals to get the tiny lifeless bodies, transported in a small black box, such as one might take fishing or to keep one’s tools. I’d return them to the funeral home: wee incubates in various stages of incompleteness and becoming. Sometimes they were so perfectly formed in miniature that they seemed like tiny icons of humanity, their toes and fingers, noses and eyes, their little selves too small, too still, but otherwise perfectly shaped and made. As with Galen and Vesalius, as with Wallace Stevens, the thing itself outweighs the idea of the thing. Thus these little fetal things, stillborn or born but not quite viable, were freighted with a gravitas, fraught with sadness, laden with a desolation born of dashed hopes and grave-bound humanity. The body, the incarnate thing, is critical to our understanding. The uterus is wellspring, headwater, home ground of our being.
In time I’d learn to sit with the families of dead fetuses, dead toddlers, dead teenagers—the parents who’d outlived the ones they’d made, the fathers who remembered the night of bliss they’d had, the kissing and embraces, the mothers who recalled their first intuitions of gravity, their gravidness, its gravitas, the grave consequences of impregnation—an ill-at-easeness in their lower core, tenderness in the breast, the momentary hot flash of a future changed or changing utterly.
“It’s only been maybe a hundred years,” says my young assistant, halfway through her childbearing years, “that women have actually owned their uteri.” And even now, she adds, the agency of men—of husbands and fathers, bishops and politicos, no less moguls and marketers—have too much a say in what goes on in the hidden places of a woman’s body, the womb and its attendant, adjacent parts: cervix, ovaries, fallopian tubes, adventitia, clitoris, labia major and minor, mons pubis, all of which conspire, as it were, to raise a chorus of praise to the mighty nature whereby we renew, repeat, reproduce and replicate ourselves.
In the panel Eve Tempted by the Serpent by Defendente Ferrari, who was painting in Turin while Vesalius was dissecting in Padua, the pale-skinned, naked teenager’s mons veneris is obscured by the filigree leaf frond of the sapling she is plucking an apple from—the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The leering, bearded, lecherous, old-mannish-faced snake, slithering up the adjacent tree, is hissing his temptation in her ear. It is the last moment of Paradise, the girl is her girlish innocence, oblivious to the ramifications, her genitalia, her tiny breasts, her consort’s parts are not yet shameful. Time will eventually blame everything on her: the Fall of Man, the pain of childbirth, the provocations of her irrepressible beauty, death itself. But for now, God is still happy with Creation. He has looked about and seen that it was good. It’s all written down in Genesis 3. The diptych panel with Adam, perhaps erect and prelapsarian, has been lost to the centuries, so we do not see how happy he is, how willing and ready and grateful he is for her succor and company, her constancy.
IT WAS A drizzling morning in the winter of 1882, in Washington, D.C.; a retinue of black-clad pilgrims gathered around a small grave in the Congressional Cemetery to bury little Harry Miller, a toddling boy who had succumbed to that season’s contagion of diphtheria. The small coffin rested on the ropes and boards over the open ground while the mother’s sobs worked their way into a rising crescendo. The undertaker nodded to the man at the head of the grave to begin. He shook his head. The mother’s animal sobs continued. She was bent over, like someone stabbed, wrapping her small arms round her uncorseted middle, holding herself together by dint of will at the point in her body where she felt the blade of her bereavement most keenly.
“Does Mrs. Miller desire it?” the speaker asked. The dead boy’s father nodded his assent.
The officiant on the day was Robert Green Ingersoll, the most notorious disbeliever of his time, his age’s Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher. Though stridently unchurched, Ingersoll was the son of the manse, the youngest son of a Congregationalist minister who preached his abolitionist views and had, as a consequence, been given his walking papers by congregants around the East and Midwest. Robert spent most of his youth shifting from church to church because of his father’s politics. Because of his father’s mistreatment at the hands of Congregationalists, Robert turned first on Calvinism and then on Christianity and, by the time he stepped to the head of the grave that rainy morning in Washington, D.C., he was the best known infidel in America—an orator and lecturer who had traveled the country upholding humanism, “free thinking and honest talk” and making goats of religionists and their ecclesiastical up-lines.
“Preaching to bishops,” a priest of my acquaintance once told me, “is like farting at skunks.” And I wonder now if he wasn’t quoting Robert Ingersoll. As he stepped to the head of the Miller boy’s burial site, Ingersoll began his oration.
I know how vain it is to gild a grief with words, and yet I wish to take from every grave its fear. From the wondrous tree of life the buds and blossoms fall with ripened fruit, and in the common bed of earth, patriarchs and babes sleep side by side.
Every cradle asks us “Whence?” and every coffin “Whither?”
They who stand with breaking hearts around this little grave, need have no fear.
We have no fear. We are all children of the same mother, and the same fate awaits us all.
We, too, have our religion, and it is this: Help for the living, hope for the dead.
Help for the living. Hope for the dead.
EVERY CRADLE ASKS us whence indeed, and every coffin whither. The abyss we consign our dead to—opened ground or fire, pond or sea or air—is incubation of a sort our sacred texts make faith claims for, hoping they are like the space, pear-shaped sometimes, no more than centimeters, hormonally engaged, impregnated by mighty nature—a primal station in the journey of our being.
WHAT BENT THE dead boy’s mother over was the grief, felt most keenly in her most hidden places, the good earthen, opened seedbed of her uterus, vacated with pushing and with pain, and vanquished utterly by her child’s death. It is the desolation Eve must have felt when one of her sons killed the other. And the wonder Andreas Vesalius beheld when looking into the bloody entrails of the Paduan girl who first unveiled for him the mystery of our coming into being, and by the sound and sense we humans get, examining our lexicon, that “grave” and “gravid” share their page and etymology, no less gravitas and gravity, “grace” and “gratitude.” And that the surest human rhymes of all are “womb” and “tomb.”
By getting the dead where they need to go, the living get where they need to be. This seems, after half a century of undertaking, the essential brief, the task most manifest, the raison d’être for a funeral. If these outcomes are not accomplished, whatever else takes place, however pleasant or wretched, meager or sumptuous, is of no real consequence. The accessories amount to nothing—the requiems and mum plants, the shaky brace of pallbearers, coffin plates and monuments, five stages of grief, seven deadly sins, ten commandments, umpteen eschatologies and apostasies—if the essential job’s not done, the rest is senseless. To deal with death we must deal with our dead, to get our riddance of the corpse, beloved though it might be, and get ourselves to the edge of the life we will be living without them. And this is coded in our humanity: when one of our kind dies, something has to be done about it, and what that something becomes, with practice and repetition, with modifications and revisions, is the done thing by which we make our stand against this stubborn fact of life—we die.
By bearing the dead to their abyss, by going that distance, the living hope to bear the loss of them. By processing the mortal remains, we endeavor to process mortality’s burdens and heartbreaks. This amalgam of corporal and spiritual works, an effort to deal with the manifest and mysterious life, has been the work that separates humanity from the other animals.
And here some sort of motion, some movement and tasking, some shifting of conditions and circumstance are implicated. Where, the discerning reader will likely wonder, do the dead need to go? Where indeed! Let me say that what the dead most need, in the moment of their death, is to be gotten, coincident perhaps with hurried and heartfelt farewells, en route to their riddance, their oblivion and abyss, whatever form it takes—the ground, the fire, the sea or air—that elemental disposition that ensures they will not embarrass themselves further by putrefaction or decomposition or any of the postmortem indignities that creatures of bone and blood and meat are prone to. Whereas the mother of Jesus was assumed into heaven, a feast in mid-August in the Western church, most of us will find the opened ground or the chambered fire or tomb sufficient to the task of final disposition, a word the etymologist will inform proceeds from dispose, which itself proceeds from the Latin disponere meaning “arrange,” influenced by dispositus “arranged” and Old French poser “to place.” Which is to say, we must arrange to place them elsewhere, thus the shoulder and shovel work, the pecking birds that pick the dead thing clean of its rot, the fire, the depths, the tree’s high branches: each an end of the done thing somewhere. There are others, we know, but in their final dispositions they are all the same.
I FIRST LANDED in Clare on February 3, 1970. The inky, oval welcome in my first passport has long since dried; still, I get a glimpse of it again every time I pass through Shannon or Dublin now, as I’ve done many dozens of times in the intervening years, going on half a century now, though we don’t feel the time going.
The man in the customs hall in Shannon chalked an X on my bag and waved me on saying, “The name’s good.” I was twenty-one and possessed of a high number in the Nixon draft lottery—a surreal exercise in the existential that had been drawn a couple months before, giving me a pass on becoming fodder for the American misadventure in Vietnam. A lackluster student without goals or direction, I thought I’d better make a move, a gesture to put some distance between my effortless mediocrity at school and my parents’ scrutiny. I’d read Yeats and Joyce and reckoned to reconnect with what remained of our family, “on the banks of the River Shannon,” as my grandfather had always prayed over Sunday dinners throughout my youth. His widow, my grandmother, a Dutch Methodist who converted to “the one true faith,” as she called the idolatrous superstitions of the crowd she’d married into, still sent Christmas greetings to “Tommy and Nora Lynch, Moveen West Kilkee Co Clare,” which is what I told the taximan in the big Ford idling outside the arrivals hall.
“Can you take me here?” I asked him, proffering the places and names scribbled in my grandmother’s sturdy cursive.
I REMEMBER NORA LYNCH, nearly seventy then, in the doorway of her home, shoulder leaning into the jamb, arms crossed, a study in contemplation, figuring to what use she might put this young Yank on his holidays. Her brother, Tommy, was holding back the snarling dog. I was dressed like a banker’s apprentice in my one black suit, polished wing tips and my dead grandfather’s watch fob, trying to make a good first impression, a little hung over from the drinks on the plane and the compression of a night crossing. And, despite my efforts, I was as disappointing a Yank as ever showed up in Clare, without property or prospects, cash or complete education. I had Yeats’s Collected Poems and Joyce’s The Dubliners. They had a newly wallpapered room with a narrow bed and a straight-back chair.
I was their first American cousin to return; they were my Irish connections, twice removed.
“Come in,” she said, “you’re perished with the journey. Sit in by the fire. We’ll make the tea.”
Nora and her brother were living on the edge—of Ireland and County Clare to be sure; the north Atlantic just over the road, the Shannon estuary below. Likewise they were, late in their sixties, at the narrowing edge of the lives they’d been given in the opening decade of the twentieth century. First cousins of my late grandfather, to my twenty-one-year-old self they seemed relics of another time entirely, Bruegel-esque, premodern, ever, as Yeats claimed, “the indomitable Irishry.”
Nora could not have seen her brother’s death, of pneumonia, coming around the corner of another year, nor her own long and lonesome vigil by the fire that would come to a close twenty-two years hence. She could not see the trips she would make to Michigan or my many returns to Moveen, nor the family, immediate and extended, who would, in the fullness of time, make the trip “home” with me. All of it was the mystery the future always is, rhyming as it does with the history of the past. The moment we’re in is a gift, the bromide holds, that’s why we call it the “present.”
And in that moment, that gray, midwinter Tuesday morning in the yard in Moveen, gift that the present tense of it was, I could not see how it would change my life, to have followed the frayed thread of family connection back to its source and headwaters to this distant townland of Moveen West, a thousand acres divided by families and hedgerows and ditches, the open palm of treeless green pastureland, dotted with shelters and stone sheds, hay barns and outbuildings, stretching from the high cliffs edging the Atlantic down-land to the gray, shingly banks of the Shannon estuary.
IN TIME I would learn all the place names, find the wells and scenic routes, flora and fauna, the mythic and epic accounts of things—how Loop Head was named for the mighty leap the Hound of Ulster, Cuchulain, made with Mal the Hag in hot and lecherous pursuit of him; how the Montbretia that blooms up the boreens and ditch banks, coast roads and villagescapes, through July and August leaped over the stone walls of the Vandeleur land lords’ walled estate in Kilrush like liberty itself, like water, escaping every effort to keep it in, propagating by mighty nature, a new reality.
THE LEAPS AND tributaries of reconnections that I pursued all those years ago were bound to place and people and the ties that bind. In Tommy and Nora I found the last and steadfast remnant of a family sept that had remained while others sailed out of Kappa Pier in Kilrush and Cobh in Cork, a century before when a nineteenth-century Thomas Lynch crossed the Atlantic on a steerage fare and found his way from Clare to Quebec and Montreal, thence to Michigan where he’d heard of a place called Jackson where the largest walled prison in the country was being built and maintained by the unskilled, gainful labor of poor immigrants. “Tom Lynch—Wanted” it read on the tin case he brought his worldly possessions in. He gave that case to his son, who gave it to his son, who gave it years later, now empty, to me.
“Tom that went,” said Nora Lynch, speaking about the uncle she never knew and handing me a glass of whiskey, “and Tom that would come back. So, now for you.” She admired the circularity of time and happenstance. The way what goes around, etcetera.
AND NODDING BY the fire after the welcome and the whiskey and the talk, so brogue-twisted and idiomatically rich, I began to feel the press of hitherto unknown forces—cultural, religious, familial and new—like Dorothy in Oz, I was a long way from Michigan and suddenly and certainly home.
It changed my life, those next three months hunkered over the sods, observing lives lived nearer the essential edge of things, keeping body and soul together, making sense of the elementals, the social and seasonal nuances, the register of imaginative and emotional dynamics, the stories and poems and songs and performances that everyone brought to the evenings’ “cuirt”—that gathering of neighbors around hearth and table, each with a party piece, a pound cake, tobacco or drink to add to the evenings’ effort to give thanks for another day that was in it. I belonged to a culture of isolates who gathered around our individual, glowing screens to connect with virtual realities. Tommy and Nora lived actual lives on life’s terms, which included both the gossip and the goodwill of neighbors, come what may. This was a time before country people could escape the contingencies of their geography, before the Fords and Vauxhalls lengthened their range of travel. In 1970 the ties that bind could only be slipped so far as “shanks’ mare” or the Raleigh bike, the pony trap or ass and cart could take them. They married over the ditch, caroused within the townland or village, got their sacraments within the parish bounds and got their income from their hard labor in their land and the local creamery. That I had come from across an ocean many of their people had crossed and never returned, that I spoke with a Midwest American brogue, that I’d experienced things that were different from them made me momentarily a minor celebrity. But only momentarily. After a while I was just Tommy and Nora’s “Yank.”
So when Tommy died the following year, in early March of pneumonia, Nora rode her bike into Kilkee to make the call to let me know. When I showed up the following morning to join the wake in progress in Moveen, it upped the ante of our connection.
“Most Yanks,” a local bromide holds, “wouldn’t give ye the steam off their water.”
So a Yank who comes running at the news of “trouble,” that deftly understated Irishism for a death in the family, seemed to them another thing entirely. But Ireland had taught me things about the ties that bind—the press of family history and place, all the rooted behaviors conditioned over generations.
And when Nora Lynch, in those first months that I spent in West Clare, took me to the graveyard at Moyarta, near the banks of the River Shannon in Carrigaholt, it was to the vaulted grave of our common man and the flagstone cut by Mick Troy with the particulars of a sadness eighty years before I ever landed.
Erected by Pat Lynch [it reads] in memory of his beloved wife, Honor alias Curry who died October 3rd 1889 Aged 62 years may she R.I.P. Amen.
The erector named in the stonecutter’s work was Nora Lynch’s grandfather, my grandfather’s grandfather, thus, my great-great-grandfather, thus, our common man. His wife, Honor, for whom the tomb was built, was a grandniece of the Irish philologist and antiquary, Eugene O’Curry, whence, according to Nora, any later genius in our gene pool. And it was Pat’s wife’s slow dying of a stomach cancer that gave him the time, in cahoots with his brother, Tom, to fashion this stone vault at the western side of the burial ground, with the great graven flagstone to cover it giving the details of his wife’s demise and his grievous love for her. He would follow in the fullness of time, as would his son and heir, Sinon, Nora’s father, as would Nora’s twin brother who died in infancy, and finally Nora, her long lonesome vigil quit in March of 1992, her tiny corpse in its wooden coffin lowered into the stone-lined, opened ground to be comingled with the bones and boxes of her ancestors.
THEY ARE ALL dead now, of course, the bed of heaven to them. And I am long since into that age when the wakes begin to outnumber the weddings and we think of ourselves as maybe mortal too. I mostly go for funerals now. Word comes by Facebook or furtive text or a call from the neighbors who look after my interests there—the house, the donkeys, the ones who come and go.
When I got word in June that the poet Macdara Woods had died, I knew I’d have to make another trip. He was, along with Leland Bardwell, Pearce Hutchinson and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, a founding editor of the Dublin literary journal Cyphers. Whereas my poetry had been pretty much ignored in my own country, publication in a Dublin literary journal made me suddenly, internationally unknown. The tiny society of poets who write in the English language would not overfill a minor-league sports stadium. More people get chemotherapy every day than read or write poetry. So, with some few exceptions, we matter almost entirely to ourselves.
Some years ago, on New Year’s Eve, I walked with Seamus Heaney behind the hearse and cortege that took the body of Ireland’s most bookish man, the poet, critic and biographer Dennis O’Driscoll, from the church in Naas to St. Corban Cemetery where he was buried. Nine months later it was Heaney in the hearse and me riding shotgun from Donnybrook in Dublin to Bellaghy in Derry, three hours journey into the north to bring the body of the dead poet home, helpless as the few hundred who gathered around the grave, having gone that distance with the great voice of our time because it was all we could do, to be with him who could no longer be among us.
Last October it was a neighbor woman’s death by cancer, in June my friend Macdara Woods by Parkinson’s, then early in August I boarded the plane again in Detroit, making my way to JFK to connect to the late flight to Shannon and thence to Cork City because the poet Matthew Sweeney died of motor neuron disease. This year the catalog of losses seems inexhaustible and I’m thinking it must be the advancing years that put me in the red zone of mortality. In February it was the poet Philip Casey, who died in Dublin of a cruel cancer; in April my dog, Bill W., long past the eight-year life expectancy of his furry mammoth breed; he was the only mammal over 100 pounds who could bide with me. He was going on thirteen when his hips and shoulders all gave out. I’d had his grave open for two years plus, fearful of getting caught with a dead dog in the deepening frost of a Michigan winter.
And there’s truth in the bromide that by going the distance with our dead, the principal labor of grief gets done, in the deeply human labor of laving the body and laying it out, lifting and lowering, watching and witnessing, having our says and silences. Which is why I’m flying tonight a day late, alas, but nonetheless, to get my friend’s body where it needs to go, from Cork City in Munster to Ballyliffin in Ulster, six hours north, where I once caddied for him. I have a hat I bought in the pro shop on the day. I keep it in the clothes press in Moveen and I’ll wear it to his obsequies on Wednesday. I’ve read with Matthew in England and Scotland, Dublin, Galway, Cork and Clare, Adelaide, and Melbourne and Wellington, Australia, New Zealand; we tutored together several Arvon Courses, at Lumb Bank and elsewhere and in Michigan. He’s been on trains and boats and planes with me and to each of my principal residences in southeast and northern Michigan and my ancestral stones in County Clare. My heart is fairly desolate these days, with a long-estranged daughter, a long-distant marriage, the low-grade ever-present sense of what Michael Hartnett called the great subtraction. I’ve been badly subtracted from these last few years. Only for the fact that I banked such friendships against the howling winter of age, that I did not miss the best years of their being and their beloveds’ beings and the times of our lives that we caused on purpose to frequently intersect. Two Octobers ago, he made me lamb chops in my own kitchen on the south shore of Mullett Lake where he sat up nights making poems that became the last ones in the last books he published this year. He called it “The Bone Rosary,” which was the name I gave to the rope of old soup bones I’d had the butcher cut from the femurs of cows and given to my dog, Bill W., to chew the marrow out of. I thought they would make a suitable memorial. The poem ties the dead dog and the dead poet together in my imagination.
THE BONE ROSARY
The big dog’s grave is already dug, a few
yards from the lake, and all the bones he’s
sucked the marrow from are strung on a rope
draped over the porch railing, a bone rosary,
waiting to be hooked to a rusty chain hung
from a metal post stuck in the ground, poking
out over the water. I can already imagine
the reactions of people in boats who’ll pass,
what they’ll think of the resident of the house.
there might be more to tickle their fancy—
I have a BB gun and ball bearings in a cupboard
that would kill as many black squirrels as I
wanted. And I might just commission a black
totem pole. And although there are no records
of anyone walking on the waters of Mullett Lake
I think I may visit a hypnotist in Harbor Springs
to see if she can facilitate this. I’d love to run out
into the middle of the lake, carrying the Stars
and Stripes and make all the folk in boats
I meet faint and fall into the water, maybe to
drown there, and befriend the big dog’s ghost.
After his burial I came to West Clare where the summer is winding to a close for another year, the last of the holiday makers are walking the strand line in Kilkee, whale watchers peer through their telescopes at Loop Head, the dolphin boat and charter fishing boat take the last of their passengers out the estuary in Carrigaholt, the pubs are frantic with late-season revelries. The pope is coming to a nation that has changed religiously in forty years since the last papal visit. There are worries, after the hot, dry June and July, that there won’t be enough fodder for the coming winter. Round bales of hay and black-wrapped silage and heaps of fodder are filling the barnyards, hopes for another cutting abound. Limerick wins the All Ireland Hurling Match, a man in the townland succumbs to his cancer; we’re passing through life is what is said. We’re passing through.
In many places they’ve lost the knowledge of the done thing and try to reinvent the ritual wheel every time a death occurs. Dead bodies are dispatched by hired hands, gotten to their oblivions without witness or rubric while the living gather at their convenience for bodiless obsequies where they “celebrate the life,” as if the good cry and the good laugh, so common at funerals, had gone out of fashion or lost its meaning. But the formula for dealing with death hasn’t changed. It is still essential to deal with our dead, to reconfigure but reaffirm the ties that bind us—the living and dead. It was the Irish connection that convinced me of that.
The reading of poems and sharing remembrances over Matthew’s dead body in its box in Cork were good to be a part of, likewise to beckon the mourners to their last look at him, close the coffin lid at the wake the following morning in Ballyliffen at the other end of the island nation, which was his home place of the many places he’d called home. He was shouldered from the house and up into the town by family and friends taking their turns at sharing the burden of his remains. Large muscle work prepares the ground of precious memories. It is not the other way around.
I rode in the hearse with Matthew Sweeney’s corpse out of town to the grave in Clonmany New Cemetery between showers and the tributes of the couple hundred fellow humans who stood out in the rain to see the poet’s body lowered into the ground. It is the done thing here, the only thing that we can do in the maw of rude mortality, the shoulder and shovel work, the words work, waling, waking, walking and witnessing, the vigil and chitchat, the hold and beholding these sad duties occasion, the stories we remember before we forget. These ties that truly bind, these sad done things uphold by focusing our diverted intentions on the job at hand, to wit, to get the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be.