BUT TODAY NEW YORK begins in moonlight, and I am glad of it. I smell a wind shift, lifting the grass blades somewhere, skipping over the steppes and surrounding my heart. Shall we blaze in anticipation of the lightning? We tire of the stare of the hypnotized, and begin to glow in several colors. Come with me to the edge of tears. Beautiful, is it not? The candle gutters but stays lit, casting a shield of light over the blue fields and the blue ice of the Chrysler Building, and the throbbing sea between them. Let the beasts stomp in their stalls. Let the ladies paint their toenails scarlet. Muster the troops. We have places to get to, now that the streets are cleared of snow. You never crash if you go full tilt. Brown penny. My head bursts with flowers.

AND TODAY IS Máire’s fortieth birthday, too, which she hates my mentioning, thinking that at forty she’s over the hill. And we’re together at Gunn’s, a half restaurant, half bar, all-Irish dive where the customers sing their hearts out at the drop of a hat. I don’t mean karaoke. That’s too modern and too easy for Gunn’s. The folks who come here are as old as I am, or young people with old souls, and they know the words to all the songs they want to sing. The piano player at the chipped and scarred and tinny upright is Rory, a guy my age, who, they say, was left in a basket at Gunn’s and decided never to leave. Rory plays everything in the key of C. It’s the only key he knows. Still, when anyone asks him to play this or that, he always asks, What key? The person says F-sharp. Rory nods, and plays it in C.

Rory! I call from our table. Máire cringes, attempting to disappear beneath her hands clasped over her head. Do you know “Happy Birthday to You”? I ask him. I want to serenade my daughter. Why? he says. Don’t you like her? In B-flat major minor, I say to him. Maestro, if you please? Right! shouts Rory, And I belt out “Happy Birthday” in the key of C, quite beautifully, if I say so myself, and there’s not a damp eye in the house. Everyone joins in, and blushing Máire is obliged to stand and curtsy. What a beauty! shouts Rory from the piano bench. Am I not! I say. And the whole place boos.

What’d you get me for my birthday, Murph? She puts on her little girl Christmas face. I got you this necklace, I say, reaching into my pocket and displaying a string of antique pearls set in a purple velvet case. Her eyes widen. They belonged to your mother, I say. They did? she says, then searches my expression. She always knows when I’m lying. No, they didn’t, she says. Well, I say, they belonged to somebody’s mother. Anyway, they’re beautiful, she says. Thank you, Murph.

I also wrote a poem for you. Oh! Read it, Murph? Don’t mind if I do, I say, and take out my little notepad.

Of all the fauna and the flora

No one’s as lovely as my Máire.

Oh, Jesus! she says.

Lovely at twenty, lovely at thirty

Lovely when she’s talking dirty.

May I go home now? She pretends to reach for her coat.

Lovely at thirty-five, lovely at thirty-nine,

Lovely drinking beer, ale, whiskey, or wine.

She sticks her thumb down her throat, as if trying to gag.

Lovely if you call her Shorty . . .

Oh no, you don’t, she says. Don’t you dare.

Lovely still, at the ripe old age of . . .

She drops her napkin in my drink.

I don’t know what you’re complaining about, I tell her. You’re a spring chicken. It’s me who’s old. You’re telling me, she says. Old, wicked, drooling. I’m not drooling, I protest. And with all that, I say, you have to admit that I’m the cutest seventy-two-year-old you ever saw. True, she says. You’re cute the way otters are cute. Cute face, mean spirit. I wouldn’t mind being an otter, I say. Lie on your back all day, eating and dreaming. So different from your own life, says my ungrateful child.

Otter dreams, I say. What do you suppose an otter dreams about? Besides herring? says Máire. Maybe learning to swim on its tummy. I brighten at her idea. Let’s write a children’s book, I suggest. The Otter Who Learns the Breaststroke. How would the book begin? she says. I lean over the table toward her. One day, I say in my best children’s book tone, the sweetest, prettiest, smartest lady otter in all the world, woke up, stretched at the sunlight, and exclaimed, It’s my birthday! Shit! I’m forty! Máire has her Irish up now. You are going to get it, she says, rising from her chair. Time to tickle the world’s oldest, meanest otter.

She knows I can’t stand to be tickled. I rise from my chair at once, and move away from her around the table, Máire in hot pursuit. Still circling, I call to Rory, “Happy Birthday” one more time, me boy? What key? he asks. Becky Sharp flat Asia minor, I tell him. You bet! says Rory, hitting a major chord in middle C. And once more the entire joint bursts out singing “Happy Birthday to You” to my beloved daughter, who stands in surrender with her arms at her sides, and helplessly laughs.

DO YOU BELIEVE in unsaid things? She takes my arm as we walk together in the littered park across the street from her house. She phoned me on her own, because she wants to talk without Jack around. It’s been a while since my dinner at their house, and I am beginning to hope that I was out of a job, that Jack had mounted the courage to tell her his fatal news without my help. Unsaid things, Murph. Do you believe in them?

I deal in things unsaid, Sarah. It’s my meat.

You do, yes. But you say them, if you see what I mean. You write them. And as soon as you do, they’re no longer unsaid. I’m talking about the things no one says, ever. Not poets. Not anyone.

Then how would we know they exist? I ask her. By unsaid do you also mean unthought?

Yes. Unthought. Or maybe unused. A realm of reality that lives between the nodes of reality.

What do you have in mind, Sarah? You’re troubled by something. Yes?

I’m troubled by lots of things, Murph. By sightlessness. By Jack. I know he wants to tell me he’s dying. Or he wants you to tell me, so that you or he will feel you did the right thing.

The right thing?

The kind thing, she says. Kindness is often one of the unsaid things.

Sarah? I study her composure. She is wearing a light raincoat and a bright red-and-yellow scarf. I ask her, Should I apologize that Jack and I plotted to tell you his diagnosis?

Never, she says, patting my arm. But it makes me feel more alone, more lonely. The worst part of being blind, Murph, is the loneliness, you know. She takes a few more steps deliberately, as if she were timing what she would say next. No, I don’t mind the plotting. What I mind is that it isn’t true.

What isn’t true?

Jack isn’t dying, Murph. He isn’t even sick. She turns her head to me. He has someone else. He’s had someone else for shy of a year. He wants to leave me and go live with her. But he knows he can’t walk out on a blind wife. He wants me to think he’s dying, so I’ll forgive him his trespasses. You’re just part of a larger story, a scam, in which he will say something like he needs to go and die alone, like an elephant. I’ll be in mourning and he’ll be off with Brunhilde, or whatever her name is. I really don’t know what he has in mind. He’s out of control, not used to dealing in a world of conflicted emotions, so he comes up with a wild plan involving you.

She says all this without a single gulp or change of inflection, in a voice neither calm nor angry, more like someone announcing a bus schedule.

Jack has found someone else, Murph. It happens. He doesn’t know how to express his feelings about it. Fact is, he doesn’t know how to express his feelings for her, or for me, which he thinks amounts to a betrayal of me. And, in a way, it does. But they are perfectly reasonable feelings for someone in love, even though he’s no longer in love with me. Yet he still loves me. Habit? He’s flailing. You were caught in the flail. He doesn’t know what to call what he’s feeling and neither do I. No one does. Right, Murph? Which is why I asked you if you believed in unsaid things.

I WISH I COULD tell you that this was the first time I’d been snookered, but it happens all the time. It may be me, the way I was made. Máire detected it right off. Most daughters do, when it comes to dads. They say that every girl child, as soon as she is born, looks up through the film on her eyes, sees her father and thinks, Sucker. I overplay the part. Or it may have some connection with being a poet—the sort of willed innocence we boyos use to regard everything, no matter how often we have seen it, as a wonder, a bright miracle. Still, I’d never been snookered the way Jack did it to me. A cold-blooded piece of work in the first place, telling someone you’re dying when you’re not. And then making me his unwitting coconspirator in the hoodwinking of his blind wife, just so he could run off with some doxie. Jesus, Mary, and What’s-his-name.

So I set out to find old Jack, to give him a piece of my mind, which in my state of mental health was a risky donation. But At Swim-Two-Birds is the only place I knew to look, and no one had seen him there. Jimmy doesn’t even remember him, which makes me wonder if Jack had been in the bar just that one day, specifically to find me. It hardly takes a Sherlock Holmes to figure out where Murph does his drinking. It occurs to me—too late, of course—that I do not know what Jack does for a living, or where he works. I consider asking Sarah, but there was something about the melancholy cool, the profound resignation with which she had told me what Jack was up to, that suggested I leave her be. She had wanted to be up front with me, so that I wouldn’t be implicated in Jack’s lie. It was a decent thing to do.

With no choice but to cool my heels, I do just that. And the Jack and Sarah affair is supplanted by things in my control. William and I have our next Central Park adventure, that turns into a near-disaster, something I want to forget, and I don’t say that often. Dr. Spector schedules me for a brain scan. I try to put it off by claiming that my scurvy is acting up again, also my rickets, but Máire says she’s going to march me over to the scan herself. I work on the poem to Oona, but it is getting away from me. Sometimes that happens with a poem. You start out writing tight, and then you overthink the thing, and it gets bigger and bigger without getting better. I plan various ways of eliminating Perachik, such as planting a bomb in his Mets cap. But it might not kill him.

Then one afternoon Sarah calls, her voice uncharacteristically shaky. Jack’s disappeared. She has not seen him since the day she and I had our walk in the park. I ask all the predictable questions about who might know where he is. His family? His boss? There is no family, far as she knows. And, strange to report, she knows next to nothing about Jack’s employment, except that he’s a bouncer in some club in New Jersey. She doesn’t even know what city. Now that she thinks about it, the club could be in Pennsylvania, or Delaware, or upstate, some town near the Hudson. I realize how odd this sounds, she says. But Jack always was evasive about his work, because he thought I’d look down on it, whereas you know, Murph, I don’t look down or up at anything. Her attempt to leaven the matter.

Have you called the cops? I ask her. They told her that Jack could not be considered a missing person officially unless she came to the stationhouse and made a formal report. When told of her condition, a lieutenant offered to come to her place but advised her to wait a few more days. In his experience with these matters, he said, husbands and wives come and go. That was a few days ago. Now I’m scared, Sarah says. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have bothered you, Murph. Fact is, we don’t have many friends, Jack and I. And the few we have I wouldn’t turn to. My folks are useless snobs. They’ll be glad that Jack’s gone. When I ask her, why turn to me, she says she thinks I’m someone she can trust. And she’s right, I guess. Only, I see that instead of being a casual visitor to Sarah’s isolated world, I’m becoming a key player. I’m not sure I like this role. Would you? Connections with strangers means connections with strangers.

THEN AGAIN, what do I know of Jack? Sarah says he doesn’t know himself. Does anyone? Yeats congratulated Synge for writing of Aran, and expressing “a life that never found expression.” What life anywhere has found expression? The true life, I mean, if there is such a thing. The island I was born on is no more hidden than the island I live on now. What do we know? What do we ever know?

In my thirties, I knew a writer named Harkness who was so hail-fellow, so welcoming and exuberant that you were made glad just to see his smiling face. The kind of guy you want to catch sight of when you walk into a crowded bar, and his hand shoots up when he sees you—Hey, Murph!—and he beckons you to join a gang of strangers to whom he introduces you all ’round, and makes you feel as if you belong. That sort of guy.

So one day out of the blue, Harkness disappears from the scene. Poof. Without a by-your-leave he packs a few clothes and takes off from his apartment on St. Marks Place for the island of St. Martin, where he gets a job washing dishes in a dive near the docks. He leaves his writing behind, and his books, not to mention a wife of longstanding and two kids under ten. Now, this is the kindest guy in the world, I’ll remind you. He once gave his whole book advance to the daughter of someone he hardly knew, so that she could go to Juilliard. And it wasn’t as if he had money to burn, either. ’Twas just the way he was. Anyway, off he goes to wash dishes in St. Martin, and live in a ramshackle room above a tobacco store. No words of explanation to anyone. His wife follows him down there, and he greets her warmly and calmly and says he’s never coming back. Friends visit him from time to time, and he gives them the same treatment. No number of pleas can make a dent. He’s where he wants to be, he says.

Then one day, he wants to be somewhere else. His fellow workers in the dive report that just after sunup one morning, Harkness takes out a skiff and points it toward the deep Caribbean, never to return. Assumed drowned. I am telling you, there was no one on Earth better with people than Harkness. Yet on one vague tropical morning, he does without anyone. The outgoing Harkness goes out forever. What do we know? What do we ever know? People with dementia: Do they know who they were?

OR ARE YOU WONDERING if I’m dreaming all this up? The way I dream up? Think about it, you say to yourself. We’re getting the whole story from Murph. No one else remembers seeing Jack but Murph, not even the bartender Jimmy. Just like old Murph. The cockamamie tale of Jack and Sarah? Wise Sarah and unfaithful Jack? Oh, and Sarah’s blind. That’s a nice touch. The old crock is talking through his hat. Or worse, he really is bonkers, just as Máire fears, and he doesn’t know when something is happening or when he’s shooting the breeze. The estimable Dr. Spector said as much. He is as capable of forgetting what did not occur as he is of forgetting the eggs.

Well, what can I tell you? I’m on your side. The whole thing sounds like horseshit. But there they were, nonetheless, the two of them. Or rather, the one of them, since Jack has flown the coop. There they were, in their tidy little Queens house, with their lies and their troubled marriage, and me in the middle, as well as the muddle. And as for the possibility that I’m remembering something that never happened, isn’t that nearly always the case? You think you remember this and that, but you don’t. You get it wrong. It wasn’t a Tuesday, it was Thursday. It wasn’t 2010. It was 1986. And she was left-handed, not right. And she wasn’t a she. But you believe in the memory anyway. Your childhood. Your parents. Your teachers. Your pals. Your lovers. Yourself. Your brave, cowardly, sensitive, senseless, adventurous, terrified self. You don’t have an accurate thought in your head, about you or anyone or anything in this holy mess of a life. But you believe you do. Memory is belief, a kind of faith. You have to dream it up. Otherwise you have no past to cling to. Right? You know I’m right.

HERE’S MY GRIPE about forgetfulness. Not that you asked. My gripe is that not enough is said about the beauty of it, the wondrous, glorious loveliness of not remembering what you want to remember, or are supposed to remember. I mean, overcook a few eggs, and your daughter calls the booby hatch. Or visit your publisher Hornby’s house in Mamaroneck, and stroll into his swimming pool when you’re still wearing your jacket and slacks, because you’re daydreaming, and everyone is ready to strap on the straitjacket. Either they deem it a sin or a social crime, forgetfulness.

But think of the fullness in forgetfulness—the universe of thought and feeling that forgetfulness replaces for the things forgotten. Or the people. Or the incidents. I think there’s a high selectivity that goes on in the brain, imaginatively choosing things we get wrong over things we get right. Words forgotten can be a pain. But the process of foraging for those words can be thrilling, like foraging for the right word in a line of a poem. The wrong word is wrong, to be sure. Still, it can be a beauty. A voyage. An obscenity.

And incidents forgotten may be preferable to incidents remembered. You forget something that happened to you because it simply is too painful, like my da’s dying. The mother of a friend of mine has Alzheimer’s. She is eighty-six today. As a teenage girl she survived Auschwitz, the beatings and the rapes. Now, she has forgotten about everything, including Auschwitz. My friend says, with a saddened satisfaction, See? She has beaten the Nazis twice.

And then there are incidents that never happened in the first place, ones you have made up whole cloth. You forget they never happened. You invented them because, for some shadowy reason, you needed them. You can get all bound up in them, carrying them to ridiculous lengths, because you wish that they had happened even though they hadn’t. It is pleasing, maybe rescuing, for you to think they happened. But they never did, and you forget.

I probably forget a good deal more than I let on to you or to Máire or Dr. Spector. But those forgotten things, though they remain forgotten, have a life of their own. Don’t you think? And a place of their own, too. They live somewhere else, like the world’s not. They live in dreams. Professor Dodds has a chapter on Homer in which he writes of the early Greeks who believed so ardently in dreams, they saw themselves as living in two worlds at once—real life and dream life. Dual citizenship. The things we forget are no matter. They are another matter. Another kettle of eggs. A vine may grow out of a ship’s plank. Who would doubt it? You can sink your teeth into an idea like that, if sinking your teeth floats your curragh, because as any good Dionysian votary knows, time and space and their attending horseshit do not exist in the world’s not. And if everyone is lonely in the world, then it goes without saying that no one is lonely in the world’s not. Makes sense. No? Or nonsense.

Let us hie thither, that’s what I say. Let us go nowhere. There’s beauty there, I’m sure of it. Or not. That’s the thing about nowhere. Everything forgotten exists and does not in the world’s not, world without end, or not. No end. Not not. Not you, not I. And if we look carefully enough, or carelessly as it were, or were not, we should find no meaning there. None. And wouldn’t that be nothing!

THEN SHE WANDERED into McCraken’s field at four in the morning, hiked up her flannel nightie, and peed on a rock. Then she called me by Pa’s name. Then she caressed a shirt drying on the line, and when I said, Ma, what are you doing, she told me to hush, it was none of my business. Then she cursed a jackdaw in language so vile, I thought at first that she was gagging on a bone. There followed a long period of silence, followed by a period of equal duration in which she told me how a boy named Niall had loved her when she was in school, and how he wanted to marry her and take her to raise sheep in New Zealand. But he was so short, Tommy. Sweet but very short. You have to eat something, Ma, I said. Then she ate a little, and less each day. Then she stopped and had to be fed through a tube. Then she was clear as a bell for a couple of weeks, and I asked the doctor if she was coming back. No, he said. These spates of clarity are part of the progress of the disease. She will return to her darkness, soon, he said. And she did. And I wondered—in the times she was silent, or sleeping, or reviling the Jamaican nurse I’d got her from the mainland, or singing the wrong words to the wrong tune—if all that were kind of a terrible mask, and the woman wearing the mask, under the mask, was lucid, right as rain, with a mind as smart and pure as it had been before all this started. I wondered if that imprisoned mind was confused and frustrated at the things the mask was saying in her behalf, yet could do nothing to remove the mask. Was she, in other words, my ma? Then I found her poring over a book. Then I saw she had ripped out the pages.

SUCH A (what do they call it?) learning experience, poring over The Atlas of the World with William. Is this a country or a city, Murph? What do you think, William? I think it’s an elephant. It looks like Elephantus, Murph! William! What would Elephantus be doing in an atlas? What does Elephantus do anywhere, Murph? Flops around. Jumps around. Ah, that’s where I’ve got you, my boyo. Elephants can’t jump. Wow! I never knew that, Murph. You know everything! Where’s Ireland? Here? No. That’s Africa. Is Ireland in Africa? I don’t think so. Is Africa in Ireland? Definitely. The little hand flips the pages. What’s this island, Murph? That’s Devil’s Island, William. Also known as England. Does the devil live there? Millions of ’em, I tell him. There’s a garden in this country, Murph. He points to Mozambique. How do you know, William? I can smell the bees, he says, in all seriousness. Well, William, you know what Gibbon said. Who’s Gibbon, Murph? Gibbon said education is lost on everyone except happy people, who don’t need it anyway. Is that Ireland, Murph? Peru, William. Close enough.

THEY SAY THAT Irishmen drink to forget we’re Irish. I say we drink to remember we’re Irish, because our poor dismal history consists of English swine trying to kick the Irish out of us. We set up the hedge schools as a show of our determination to teach the Irish language. No one really wanted to learn it. Irish is a limited language, truth be told, especially for modern poetry, though there’s a sweet sound of whispers to it. No, the hedge schools were simply another way to stick it to the Brits. It takes a jar or three to remind an Irishman that he has a culture, a nation, a sound.

Want to know why the Irish make good poets? Sure you do. You’re dying to know. Well, we make good poets because we know how to deal in absent things, the things taken from our lives, like food and dignity. And legs. We’ve been learning to do without since the ancient Irish writings left out vowels. No vowels in ancient Irish. Try pronouncing a sentence of that. Then again, the spoken language of today adds more words when you expect less, too, just to prove our English is different. There is no word for yes or no in Irish and none in our use of English either. Ask an Irish woman if it’s cold outside, she’ll say, “It is.” Ask an Irishman if he’s happy, he’ll say, “I am.” I take that back. No Irishman is happy. But you get the point. We stretch out the sentences. I mean, what the hell else do we have to do but talk?

Now I’m not including Kerrymen in all this because Kerry is the stupidest county in Ireland by miles, which is saying something, since all the counties in Ireland compete for the title of stupidest. But Kerrymen are also unique in that they only answer a question with a question. This proposition was put to the test one day when a visitor to the county stood directly across the street from the post office, and asked a Kerryman passing by if that was the post office over there. The Kerryman looked and said, Is it a letter you’d be mailin’? And they can be sharp when it suits them. At a Kerry funeral, someone was asked to say a few kind words about the deceased, who was hated by the whole town. The eulogist said, His brother was worse.

Synge, my fellow Inishmaan resident, was more typically Irish than most of our writers, even though he was a Protestant, or a West Brit as we like to call ’em. But in his cramped rented room in the cottage on Inishmaan, called Synge’s Cottage today, he listened well to the talk going on in the kitchen. And because he had an ear for music, he picked up the rhythms of the talk for his dialogues. More than that, he caught the essence of the country, the beauty and the madness—how a blind couple could love and hate each other in The Well of the Saints, how a town could make a hero of a boy who boasted that he’d killed his da, in The Playboy of the Western World, and how an old man could break his heart over a young woman in love with a young man, and how all could be brought down in Deirdre of the Sorrows. Synge, who was dying when he wrote Deirdre, was in love with a much younger woman himself, the knockout actress Molly Allgood. He wrote a poem predicting how she would react to those who bore his casket, that she would rend them with her teeth.

On the island Synge used to sit in a stone seat now called Synge’s Chair. Have I told you about this? Just messin’ with you.

Rend. Teeth. Lovely words. Penny, brown penny. Lovely words. Oona was a lovely word. Greenberg was a lovely word. What happens to a person when the words go, do you suppose? And how do they go—in clusters, or one by one, like the lethal computer Hal in 2001, whose vocabulary dwindled to a precious few words after Keir Dullea pulled his plug? I don’t recall Hal’s very last words. What will be mine? I wonder. Something profound and ethereal, like Goethe’s “More light”? Maybe “More lite beer.”

THOMAS JAMES MURPHY, the celebrated poet, genius, cardsharp, pop singer, piano bar player, raconteur, bon vivant, and all-around good guy died last night in his home in New York City, from complications arising from a loss of memory. His daughter, Máire, reports that for the past few months Mr. Murphy had been wondering which of two forms of death—of the body or the mind—would take him first. As it turned out, both forms reached him simultaneously. He forgot to go on living. Born on Inishmaan in the Aran Islands, Mr. Murphy, who was devilishly handsome, with a joie de vivre and a coupe de ville and his heavenly baritone voice and sea-blue eyes, sailed to New York in his early twenties, and at once established himself as a literary wunderkind. Lillian Hellman herself knew him as Timothy. And he never wrote back to W. D. Snodgrass. Critics hailed his work as astonishingly original, amazingly derivative, delightful, repellant, hard-edged, mawkish, brilliant, and stupid. His wife of fifty years, the former Oona O’Donnell, died of endometrial cancer, a year ago in January. It was said that “Murph,” as he was known, was never the same afterward, which most of his friends regarded as an improvement. Beside his perfect if pain-in-the-ass daughter, Mr. Murphy is survived by his delicious grandson, William, Jimmy the gabby publican, Jameson Distillers, by his new friend Sarah, and by the superintendent of his apartment house, Danny Perachik, a known rat. Mr. Murphy’s last words were . . . I forget.

FROM THE FAR SIDE of her desk, that rises like the Great Wall of China, Dr. Spector regards me as if I were a can of spoiled sardines. In return I give her my cutest smile, which seems to further displease her. I know you’re used to people being charmed by you, Mr. Murphy, she says, and I’m sure you thought I’d be tickled pink by your answers to the Ohio State test I sent you home with. I start to say I didn’t know what color she’d be tickled, but she goes on. Mr. Murphy, I’m going to treat you like a grown-up. A stretch, I realize. But you have been wasting my time. And hard as it may be to believe, my time is valuable. Every second I devote to your nonsense, I take away from someone who wants and deserves to be helped.

You’re also wasting your own time, she says, and there may not be much of that left. Your daughter tells me the super in your building reports that you’ve left your front door wide open at least half a dozen times in the past weeks. (I must remember to cut out Perachik’s liver.) That’s in addition to the now myth-size eggs and swimming pool stories. She says you’re also starting to make things up that could not have occurred, but you seem to believe them. (I meant to tell you about the front door business, but it slipped my mind.)

So, these are signs, Mr. Murphy. I can’t say how bad, but definitely heading downward. I start to speak, but she shuts me up with a wave of her hand. I am finding her less like Joanne Woodward by the second, and more like Judith Anderson in Rebecca, without Judith’s puckish sense of humor.

Let me tell you what we’re dealing with here, scientifically, Mr. Murphy. Memory is a tricky item. It resides in patterns of neural activity all throughout the brain. After “neural activity” I begin to tune her out. There follows science shit, followed by more science shit at “cortex,” followed by “FDA-approved drugs,” followed by two more references to science shit, followed by “fiber tracks,” followed by “schedule a brain scan for you,” followed by science shit, science shit, and science shit. Our one-sided colloquy concludes with, But until then, Mr. Murphy, I want you to shape up. And before you fall to your knees and assure me of your heartwarming reformation, since I don’t trust you, I’m going to inform your daughter of everything I’ve told you today. In short, you’re cooked, Mr. Murphy. She exits before I can ask her for a balloon.

THE PARK IS GRAY and I am blue, thinking about how long it takes to live a life, and what do you wind up with? Age. People say it’s unseemly to feel sorry for yourself, but I enjoy feeling sorry for myself. Who else would feel sorry for me? It gives me a hole to crawl out of when I write my poems. Snap out of it, Murph, I say. And then I do. Oona used to say it for me. I hear her now. Snap out of it, Murph. I keep walking and try. September is New York’s best month, don’t you think? You feel the sunshine and the shrinkage all at once. Accordion days. Too bad it’s January.

Three teenage girls sidle past me on the walking path. Two Irish, one Italian is my guess, each of them pretty and smiling and nodding to the old man. Snodgrass again: younger, pinker, out of reach. I smile back, like a dead star. I proceed a few steps and feel a hard shot to the nape of my neck. Now I’m down on my back in the path with the three darling teenage tree nymphs whom I passed a couple of seconds ago standing over me, and telling me to give them my money. See these? says the tall brunette, holding up the back of her hand and indicating her fingernails filed sharp as lobster forks. I’ll cut you with these. Then the plump blonde kicks me square in the ribs. The stash, she says. They still use that word?

I reach under me for my back pocket and my wallet, and present all I have, maybe a hundred. That seems to drive the girls wild with happiness. The third girl, with the tattooed throat, gives me one more shot in the thigh for good measure before they all run off shouting and hooting. I’d have kicked their asses if I’d had four other guys with me.

Limping home from the park, I spot the sometimes-poet Arthur again. Arthur! Murph! Arthur the Bear! Murph the Bard! Today his mood is up. He has established an outdoor living room in front of the church on Amsterdam and Eighty-sixth. Apparently he has scavenged furnishings from the local garbage, and has come up with a fairly complete place, consisting of a maroon sofa, with frayed floral-pattern upholstery, a Barcalounger with a missing arm, a couple of deck chairs, two unmatching end tables bearing two porcelain lamps plugged into nothing, and a three-legged plastic coffee table resting on an orange shag rug. I enter his room, and take one of the deck chairs. Arthur sits on his sofa, as always bundled against the cold, and looking more bearlike than ever, but otherwise at ease and self-possessed.

I just got mugged in the park, Arthur, I tell him. That’s nothing, Murph. When I’m living in my cave, I get mugged all the time. Well, maybe you’re right, I say. I’m probably making too much of it. How’s tricks, Arthur? Good, Murph. Good. Couldn’t be better. He hesitates. I want to remain with him in case the cops come, so I can explain his condition to them. But I’m kind of busy just now, he says. We sit in silence for a minute. He grumbles. Writing any poems? I ask. He shakes his massive head. I get the feeling I’m boring him. He stares at me impatiently. Finally, he says, I don’t mean to be rude, Murph. But I’m expecting guests.

DEAR MURPH,

I like good singing as much as the next guy. And I don’t have to tell you, you have great pipes. But when you stand in the courtyard at midnight, belting out “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” at the top of your lungs, all four verses, the people in the building complain. And I mean loud complaints. About twenty of them. So, please, Murph. No more. I wouldn’t want to have to report this to the landlord.

Yours sincerely,

Daniel A. Perachik (Dan)

Superintendent

P.S. It didn’t help that you were singing in your skivvies.

Dear Danny Boy,

May I drop over and strangle you?

Yours sincerely,

Thomas J. Murphy

Strangler

IF MCCLEERY CAN DO IT, I can do it. Have I told you about this? About McCleery? He strangled a dog. Big mother, it growled at McCleery and bared its teeth. And McCleery strangled it with his hands. Picked it up by the throat, stared straight into its wild red eyes, and choked the life out of it. Right there, in his own backyard. A cart wobbled down the road, drawn by a donkey covered in mud. An owl wheeled under the moon. Mrs. McCleery told her sister from Wicklow to get out of the kitchen, and stay out. And McCleery strangled a dog.

KNOW WHAT I THINK? Of course you do. I’m always telling you what I think. I think these people, Dr. Spector and her crew of experts, have a severely limited view of memory. Some years ago, I was giving a reading at a college in Ohio, in the science building, of all places. And on the way to the auditorium, I walked past this massive wall chart of the human genome that tracked our genetic makeup back millions of years, to the chimps. So I asked a biologist who taught at the college how much of what people are made up of today existed in the original chimps. She said 95 percent. See what I mean? Our bodies are memory. The whole human race is composed of memory. My point is you can’t lose your memory. You can misplace it, or relocate it. But you can’t lose it, no matter what Máire or Dr. Spector or Perachik the informer says, unless your definition of memory is as narrow as an open door or a swimming pool or a fucking egg. Who cares if I forget my area code, for Chrissake? And the only reason I strolled into Hornby’s pool was that I get so flummoxed in social situations, I put myself in a daze. I could have walked anywhere. Lucky he doesn’t live in a penthouse.

About Perachik? How am I or anyone to know if what he’s saying about me is true? The little rat has a vested interest in getting me out of the Belnord, and into some assisted nuthouse. My landlord, to whom Perachik would not want to have to report my behavior, would pay the honorable superintendent a handsome little squealer’s fee for services rendered to get his greedy paws on my rent-stabilized eleven rooms, and make three apartments out of them, each renting for five times what I pay now for the whole shebang. Why would anyone base an opinion of anything on the word of the slimy bastard, Perachik, I’d like to know. And there are only three verses to “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” Just sayin’.

All right, all right. Dr. Spector has a point. If my behavior keeps spiraling down, I’ll be a fucking albatross to Máire and William. So when that happens, I’ll know it, I’m certain of that. And I’ll go to Virginia or some other enlightened state where a Dalmatian puppy can pick up a shotgun at a fruit stand, and I won’t forget the shells, and I’ll blow my empty head off. But until that time, let me glory in the fact that I am memory, and you are memory, and you can think about that next time you crave a banana.

SO I CALL OUT to the boyos carrying the curragh on Eighty-sixth Street outside the Belnord, Where are you going with that? We’re goin’ fishin’, old man. Want to come? You bet! I say. And we head through the park over to the East River, toss the curragh in the water, and jump in after. It’s a hell of a town, New York, is it not? I say. ’Tis, they say. They got girls here and fish and poems, too. What else do you need? Not a goddam thing, we all agree. And we’re drinking pints and singing songs and having a grand old time, until a yacht comes along and wakes us, and we drown.

HAD I NOT been asleep, William, I would have missed the otters.

What otters, Murph?

The otters who were marching in my dream, William.

Were they soldiers, Murph?

They were. But they were soldiers without guns. They had bananas instead. And when they had finished with their marching, they laid down their bananas, and went swimming on their backs, the way otters do. Otters are masters of the backstroke, William. Your mother loves them. Ask her.

Are otters friendly, Murph?

Very. They also look you in the eye. I never met a shifty otter. They also read the classics. Like War and Otters and The Otter Also Rises. A great author named Homer wrote a long poem called the Ottersy, about a brave hero named Otterseus. Otters have a wonderful life. They lie on their backs, balance books on their tummies, and read the day away.

I wish I could see them.

Well, if you fall asleep now, right now, you might see them. If you don’t fall asleep, you might miss them. What’s worse, William [kissing his forehead, and pulling up his covers], the otters will miss you.

Night, Murph.

Night, my boy.

A LETTER from Sarah:

Dear Murph, I hope you won’t mind my writing you. But with Jack gone—I did file a missing person’s report—I have no companionship. And writing affords companionship, as I don’t need to tell you. Let me be clear, though, before you get all anxious and think, Oh Jesus, do I have to become this blind girl’s pen pal? Or worse, exchange opinions on books with her, like those stories of high-minded, like-minded literary poo-bahs? Not at all. In fact, Murph, I’d prefer that you do not write back. For one thing, I don’t want you to go to the trouble of making tapes or CDs, or even more difficult, using one of those gizmos that type braille. (I’m using a braille typewriter myself, a Perkins Brailler, which is great but a pain in the ass.)

It’s not worth the effort. I’m not worth the effort. You would reach this conclusion yourself after not too long a while, and you would resent me, which I do not want. Mainly, I just want to be able to call out to you once in a while, as a second conscience. Think of these letters as messages without a return address. Does that make sense? If I knew I was writing them only to myself, there would be no pleasure in it. It would exacerbate my loneliness, not relieve it. But if I know you’re at the receiving end, Murph, I can spill my guts, such as they are, and know you’ll catch what I’m tossing. (A revolting image.) In any case, thanks in advance, as they say. More anon, as they also say. Who are these “they,” anyway? And why aren’t they around when you need them? As ever, Sarah.

UNDER THE WHITE COVERLID, now as then, my Belnord cottage rolls, the same cool turning. Memories run wild, as if the night had released all its prisoners. My ghosts are younger now. Imagine that. I am older than my ghosts, yet they retain a certain je ne sais quoi—authority? I love this time of night, this bed that makes me alert to everything—the hours, the planes in flight, the faucet drip. My senses gleam like candles. Sleep with me, life. There is no breakage, no estrangement. Fuck dementia.

REMEMBER THE DREAMS instead. Remember, for instance, the morning Mannahatta first came into view, through a gauze so dense, you could not tell if the magic isle was in front of your nose or elsewhere, miles away. And the fact that the immense island floated on geysers of air did not help. It swayed this way and that, and also that way, sometimes quavering like an arthritic hand, sometimes soaring starward, yet without rising. The density was noteworthy—five hundred feet of adamant, layered over with strata of minerals and topsoil, the muck and oozings of the land from which vertical rocks rose, archives blazing in the suns. There were two suns, one above the island, no more than three hundred feet high, one below at the same remove. Infinity glimmering. What a sight for a boyo from the Emerald Isle, who had not laid eyes on an emerald in all his twenty years. But Mannahatta was agog with emeralds and sapphires and rubies, diamonds too. Oh, the diamonds! Bracelets and tiaras encircling the flagpoles.

Drawing near, one could see that the island sloped downward in a funnel toward the center, where thousands of wide clay pots, vats really, collected rainwater and converted it into books. Flagons of mead were distributed to the poor, who (foolishly) used them as bocci balls. A prelate banged a crozier on a marble table. A baker paled. Along the walls of the slope were staircases consisting of thousands of steps from which people fished for carp and compliments. Guidebooks told that the principal occupations of Manhattanites were music, mathematics, and butchering, and that the women were rich and loose. Nearer still, and it seemed that the staircases were made of bone. Alabaster, perhaps. Or snow.

At the center of the water vats, there appeared to be a black hole or chasm, that upon closer inspection turned out to be a bazaar, as in the Arabian Nights, the booths constructed out of the wrecks of ships, like ours, ships from all over the world that had sailed to Mannahatta for centuries. The booths displayed china dogs and precious rugs and fabrics—bolts of red and gold cloth, and works of art, both fine and cheap, and slaves, too, both black and white, whose singing talent was evident even at our distance, and whose chains dazzled in the light. A perpetual thunderstorm roiled therein, and gulped and gasped, its noise so deafening we plugged our ears. The rain licked the cobblestones on the quays.

Stone-eyed kids ran to greet us at the pier, ragged and scrawny, in pleated skirts and prep school blazers with coats of arms. They wore garlands of green leaves and sang in a language none of us knew. A bier bearing the body of an ancient priest with a thick white beard was wheeled in among them, and hundreds of the citizens lined up to view it. Some identified the man as their father. Others did not. At the appearance of the bier, the children dispersed, and then the bier disappeared. Where the bazaar had stood only moments earlier, there now was a flat grassy plain, with a few scattered pedestals in disrepair, and stone heads fallen at the bases, as in a defunct outdoor sculpture gallery. Excitement rolled through our decks, first class to steerage, but just as we were about to tie up at the pier, the immense island lurched and flew again, making it impossible for us to reach it. Then the stone-eyed kids returned and tossed us ropes. And at last we were home. Remember?

SELF-MADE EXILES like me are a dime a dozen, and that goes for fussy, cock-o’-the-walk Jimmy Joyce as well. Pray silence for the gates, the ones who remain in the fields, swinging open and closed, coming nowhere, going nowhere. Hinged, unhinged. A tip of the cap to those who stay put, the grayed deadwood not fit for kindling. The gates. The gates are Ireland.

SAYS HERE IN “Why Do Men Love Islands?” that Masafumi Nagasaki, a seventy-six-year-old skinny boyo with a nice even tan (the photo), lives in hermetic solitude and “apparently content” on a rocky island off the Japanese coast. Way to go, Masafumi. Says your island is “inhospitable,” and that you have endured typhoons, as you walk around naked. Glad they have no photo of that, Masafumi. I mean, who knows what you’re doing with yourself, you old devil.

As for Murph, he has lived on two islands all his life, both darlin’ places. The isle of my birth is an extension of the Burren, the terrain made of limestone pavements with crisscrossing “grikes” or cracks in it. The isolated rocks are called “clints.” As in Clint Eastwood and Zorba the Grike. There was a period of glaciers, as there always is, followed by the Namurian phase, resulting in what geologists call one of the finest examples of a glaciokarst landscape in the world. That is to say, more rocks. And weren’t we Inishpeople proud.

Now, Manhattan can also be seen as an island of rocks—vertical and gleaming, to be sure, but basically rocks. Says here in “Why Do Men Love Islands?” that my gender consists of loners like Masafumi, that we tend toward isolation, that we all would like to be Robinson Crusoe, that we swoon for the sea, and that we’re antisocial romantics. I say it’s the rocks.

LET TWO PAIRS of rowers start out toward each other from opposite ends of the ocean. Let one pair embark from Inishmaan and the other from Manhattan, and let them sing shanties as they go. Let the ocean be difficult for them, tossing and menacing. Let them think of giving up and turning back. But let them not turn back. Let them row in stippled strokes through the inhospitable sea, and the shouting weather, and the elegiac crashing of the waves. After a long time, let them reach sight of each other in midocean at last, and let them wave in joy and triumph. When they pull their boats alongside each other, let them weep and embrace. Let them inquire of each other’s health, and of their families’ health, and of their genealogies and roots. Let them praise each other and teach each other, and offer solace. Let them sing to each other, tell tales to each other, propose commercial enterprises to each other, and the creation of parks and cities, and galleries of art. Let them sleep and dream of the sublime. Finally, let them ask of each other why they undertook this mission in the first place. Let them not know why.

ARE YOU OUT THERE? The cry of poets everywhere. Are you out there? Meaning, not merely you at this minute, but you who exist a hundred, a thousand years from now. Are you reading old Murph, Sir Thomas James Murphy, Esq. himself. DEA, PCP, SUV, KFC? Have I done anything worthy of reaching across the plains of the years to you in your dumps or palaces? I see you walking in the stubbled fields, heads down over a book. A book! Still? Is it The Collected Works of Thomas J. Murphy you’re reading, or, if not all the works, a work or two, a phrase or clause, perhaps a single word quoted in your version of Bartlett’s. Even a plagiarized idea will do. Or have the secret police banned any mention of my name. Something?

Show me the palms of your hands. Show me on Skype. Nothing. The leathery puckered palms of your two-fingered hands. Nothing. Have you no interest in what went before? I may not be much, but I went before. My head teems with galaxies. Someday, in the year 5014, you too will have gone before, and if you write a poem, you too will ask, Are you out there? Of course, it is possible that at this stage of erosion you know nothing, including your own desires. You may have evolved to eyeless petunias marooned at the farthest edge of Lusitania, where there is only fog and skulls, in a place so desolate, it makes Inishmaan look like Metropolis. Yet, if you do not read me, if you do not read anyone, why kiss?

Rumors of your existence have reached headquarters. Before the mass suicides that ordinarily attend such bulletins, you might send word that someone is reading someone somewhere. Even if you have to make it up. Here I gladly abandon my ego. If nothing of mine survives, so be it. But Wallace Stevens? What of Wallace Stevens? Surely Mr. Death must have tunneled his way out of the camp, enduring the critics and other fecal matter, and found his way to you, bearing a poem or two, a line or two, or a thought. He said that poetry reveals appearances and renovates experience. Something worth preserving in that. No? Health. He said poetry is health. To your health, then. Sláinte. Cover your nostrils and your eyes. What is that howling? You?

Hard to believe that all our excursions end in ice. If I have a past, I have a future. My projections are contained in my time capsule. Within me I hold what is to come. I need not see it. Poetry should carry my future, even if the anthologies are airy, and the range of colors is reduced to gray, and there is no light in you. No light. Then read by my light, the light of me, by my flickering hope that by some means of transport, in the pebbles and the terns, shivers news of me and mine. You are my tongue. You are my poem. Are you out there?

Where can it be found again,

An elsewhere world . . .

—Seamus Heaney, in Thomas Murphy’s

Book of Dandy Quotations

DO DREAMS COUNT in the places that keep public records? Where a village stores the titles connected to land and the houses, and the histories of streets, and who lies buried in what plot in the cemetery. Has anyone ever founded such a hall for dreams? The dreams of the villagers. That would be something. Yes? The Hall of Recorded Dreams. Like that vast granite Hall of Justice built on Centre Street in New York in the 1830s, called The Tombs, where, alongside the courts, they kept inmates on Death Row, who walked across a Bridge of Sighs to the gallows. The Hall of Recorded Dreams would be even bigger than The Tombs, but it would be bright and full of life. And music playing. All the pop tunes that people hear in their minds. And there would be an Annex to the Hall, for Unrecorded Dreams that people kept to themselves, like prayers. What a field trip for schoolchildren, to walk through the catacombs and the stacks, and pluck down their family’s dreams, and their friends’, and their own. You could read your old man’s unrecorded dreams. Here’s my da’s. Oh, Jeez. They’re all about me.

THE HOTEL ROOM is cramped, with dark green walls. It smells of tobacco and creosote. The picture of Don Quixote over the brass bed is not the usual, in that the Don is wearing gray running shorts and a blue beret instead of the knight getup, and is holding a Bic pen instead of a lance. The fireplace requires a shilling for the heat. Finding only pesos in my bathrobe pocket, I remain cold. Somewhere Dean Martin is singing “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” so clearly, I wonder if he is in the room with me. Outside on the esplanade, a smiling couple seated at a round table with a red-checkered tablecloth are toasting each other with steins of coffee. He noodles her hair. They may be posing for an ad. At an adjacent table, a wolf and a goatherd are locked in conversation about the Ebola virus. The wolf slouches. The skull of the goatherd bulges like a purple lung. They speak in the language of the forests. A beggar approaches the table of the smiling couple, carrying a rolled-up canvas that he unfurls like the phases of the moon to reveal Las Meninas, the original Velázquez painting. He wears the hard shoes of an Irish dancer and a tunic of gold lamé. The couple ignores the masterpiece, and the beggar sighs, moves on, and vanishes on the road into a calamity of geese. In my hotel room sits an old DuMont TV with a circular frame for the tiny screen. W. D. Snodgrass is on the set of the Tonight Show, behind a heavy carved-wood desk. He is editing a manuscript. Startled, he looks up, and says, Murph? Why didn’t you write?

Murph? William says. Murph? Murph? I open my eyes to find my little William beside me on the bench in the park playground, tugging at my sleeve. Murph? Were you sleeping? Christ, I mutter, scared to death. I clutch him to me.

SO I CLUTCHED HER to me. But she broke my hold, and the cloak of my trance was lifted from my shoulders and I lay on the field, eyes open to the stars in shambles. Until that time, I lived in my dream state, riding the red mare bareback in midriver, the horse snorting and shaking the water off her, splashing, and stretching her great neck. When we came to the hospital, she bolted and threw me. I inquired after Cait. Her room was a pandemonium of tubes and sponges. It smelled of resolution. Cait herself was a pandemonium of tubes and sponges, invisible under the riot, which made it difficult to hold a conversation. So I held her instead, the tubes and sponges and the girl, now small as a name, saying this and saying that. How’s life? I asked her. Life? she said. Why are you weeping, Murph? Ya big sissy. Life could not be better. Life’s the best. Then she slept. And after a year or two, wouldn’t you know it, she flew out the hospital window in the company of a white crow, soaring high, so very high, all that was left of her was a pinpoint of light, like a point of emphasis, deep in the firmament. Since there was nothing more for me to do after that, I rested in the bed where Cait’s body had been, lay down in the depression her body had made. And I tried to fill it. But, of course, I could not.

I SAW GREENBERG weep only once. Not weep, exactly. Tear up. Have I told you about this? We were lounging in the backyard of the frame house in Sunset Park we lived in before he found Barry for himself and Oona for me. We were twenty-eight, twenty-nine, with little to do during the week but work (he at law, I at teaching Catholic girls in short plaid skirts) and tell each other stories on the weekends. I was exotic to him for Inishmaan. He was exotic to me for everything—Harvard, Yale, lacrosse, the navy. One delicious summer evening, as we stretched out in our cheap chaises, he grew quiet at something I had said that reminded him of an incident with a kid named Forrest. It was at Groton, and Forrest, a rich thug from Greenwich, began to taunt Greenberg, first for being Jewish, then for being gay. He blustered into my room, and loomed over me, Greenberg said. I sat at my desk, trying not to acknowledge him, but Forrest persisted. Hey Jewboy. Hey fag. I was bigger and stronger than he was, and I knew how to box, so I kept my cool for as long as I could. Then I told him to leave the room. He tipped my chair so that I fell to the floor on my back. Without thinking, I leapt to my feet and punched him hard in the face, four or five times in rapid succession. I heard his nose break. Then I hit him in the eyes, and I heard one of the sockets crack, too. It was all over in a matter of seconds, and he stumbled from my room, screaming and wailing. We both were just fifteen. No one ever blamed me. Not the headmaster. Not even Forrest’s parents, who were too familiar with their son’s foul temperament. But when Forrest was out of my room, I closed the door and wept. Why? I asked him. He had turned me into a savage, Murph, he said. Just like him.

ONE THING we never did. We never took revenge on the bastards. When we’d won our freedom, and could have raped their women, burned their fields, hobbled their horses, and taken apart their manses stone by stone, we did not. Know why? Because Irishmen are angels? Hardly. It was because we didn’t want to create a national memory of which we’d live to be ashamed. Purely a practical measure. ’Twas that simple.

I don’t know that people appreciate how much of so-called civic virtue consists of purely practical measures. We had an ancient system of land distribution on Inishmaan that sounds as if it was the result of high-minded democratic thinking. It was called rundale, and, as far as I know, it’s still practiced on the island. Every landowner had three fields, enclosed by rock walls. One field was good, tillable land, one was so-so, and one was good for nothing. The distribution was the same for everyone, so that no one ever felt too rich or too poor. Now you might say that such a system presaged socialism or communism or something aggressive like that. But no one ever heard of those things on Inishmaan. And neither was rundale worked out to effect justice and fair play on the island. It was just common sense. With a system like that in place, no one would ever be knocked off for his land. And no one was.

Know why I work with the homeless? Because I feel sorry for them? Because I think everyone should do things like that? Because I believe that the homeless deserve all the kindness we can give them? Yes, on all counts. Gotcha.

WHICH REMINDS ME, I haven’t looked in on the folks in the shelter in a couple of weeks. So, with nothing more pressing to do, to put it mildly, I head over to the church. Reynolds and I hug and chat. I must say, it took me a while to get used to men hugging the way we do these days. On the island, if a boyo hugged you, he was passing-out drunk. I tell the minister I’ve seen Arthur a couple of times recently. He looks in pretty good shape, I say—I mean, for Arthur. Good shape? says Reynolds. Arthur the Bear? You haven’t read about Arthur? I haven’t read about anybody, I say. Poor Arthur, says Reynolds. Last Monday, in the middle of the afternoon, he climbed into a cage at the park zoo, the one vacated by Gus, the polar bear who died a couple of years ago. He bounded around on all fours and swiped his arms in the air like paws and reared up, as if on hind legs. Zoo visitors thought he was playing at first. Then they recognized the horror. Arthur had gone totally mad. The Bear became a bear. He’s in Manhattan State now. You know? The mental hospital near the East River? They have him in an isolated cell. Can he receive visitors? I ask. I went yesterday, says Reynolds. It’s pointless. I think, Poor Arthur. What do we know? What do we ever know?

THE OTHER DAY, the TV had a news story about a Piper Cub in Florida. The pilot radioed that he was running out of gas, and that he was going to make a forced landing on a nearby beach. As he was bringing down his plane, a little girl was walking near the edge of the water. The wing of the plane clipped the little girl and decapitated her. The pilot was unhurt. What do we ever know? If the girl had not been walking in that exact spot, if the pilot had better calculated the amount of fuel in his tank before taking off, if he’d chosen another beach, if she’d chosen another beach, and so forth. As it was, the pilot climbed out of his cockpit, looked around in gratitude for his safety, and saw the head of a little girl bobbing in the surf.

WHAT DO WE KNOW? Poets like to revel in the power of language. Words. Glorious words. But there’s Gabriel in “The Dead,” who also thinks that words constitute a life and a love. And there’s Joyce, too, who believed in words as an artist, even as he picked apart Gabriel’s narcissisms. It’s nice that we believe in the power of words, but that power is nothing compared to the power of the life it aspires to represent. A Piper Cub. A little girl. Nothing. Sometimes I think writers suffer from a vanity about words, and this leads to a smugness of thought, a silly self-satisfaction and an undeserved ennobling. My da would have looked away in contempt and spat a chaw. “Brown penny, brown penny.” Yes, Michael Furey was passionate. Yes, he died for love. Yes, Gretta yearned for that passion, and Gabriel will never know it. But what is all this to a life of real struggle? Arthur the Bear’s poor life, for example. If you ask me, Maria of “Clay” is more alive (read heroic) than the whole lot of ’em in “The Dead,” because she dares to wake up every morning and face life in the laundry. The daughter of a friend, another poet, died a few years ago. Billy Collins wrote him, “Sometimes there are no words.” It was a beautiful thing to say, and also right. Sometimes there are no words. And when we come upon those times, we are not living in “The Dead” or writing “The Dead.” We are dwelling helplessly in life, on the sunny beach in Florida. I love being a poet. And I do the best I can to make my writing useful (aesthetically, philosophically, practically) for others. But not for a moment do I think that my words are equal to life. If anything, they prove how inadequate I am to the grand discombobulation. So maybe that’s the true power of words—to show us how puny they are in the face of everything they attempt to say. And maybe that’s why poets write, to show the power of our powerlessness, in a storm at sea.

TWO LETTERS, back to back:

Dear Murph, My demi-thought of the day: Jack has disappeared. But does anybody disappear? I don’t mean in the way of Amelia Earhart, Judge Crater, and Jimmy Hoffa. I mean every one of us. Memory keeps us all alive, so no one ever dies and no one disappears. D. B. Cooper. Didn’t you see him last week, shopping in Bergdorf’s? Elvis? I’m sure that cop on the beat is Elvis. Not that I want to elevate Jack to the realm of disappeared celebrities. But whether he shows up or shows up dead, he cannot disappear. He lives in my mind, even in yours. This is immortality, isn’t it? I read that Lewis Thomas said that while he did not believe in reincarnation, he had to concede the scientific proposition that nothing in nature ever disappears. So people remain, loitering in the corners of our recollections. As ever, Sarah.

Dear Murph, Still nothing from or about Jack. Is he dead, do you think? Murdered by someone he bounced in his bar? Or by his girlfriend? If she did it, depending on the circumstance, I might serve as a character witness for the defense. I don’t mean that. Just a wisecrack. I don’t wish Jack ill. I’m not even sure I want him back. The first couple of weeks were hard. But now it’s different. You know the song “I Get Along Without You Very Well”? About someone who doesn’t mean it? I mean it. I do miss the little noises. The silence gets to me. But I’m not sure I miss Jack. What was your wife like, Murph? Let me guess. Irish no-nonsense? I think she had to be that way because she married nonsense, for balance, just as you married good sense. These winter days are lovely, are they not? The wind kicks up, sways you as if you were dancing with it. You poets make a fancy fuss about the snow and rain. If I were you, I’d take up the wind. It’s an under-appreciated element of nature. Do it, Murph. A poem about wind. As ever, your windbag, Sarah.

SHE HAS SOMETHING there, about silence, Sarah does. It can get on your nerves, seep into your skin, especially when you contrast it with sounds you are used to, as Sarah is doing now. But there’s more to it, don’t you think? There are two kinds of silence, it seems to me. One is that place where we tuck our thoughts and feelings. You can betray in silence, brood in silence, envy, pity, plot, yearn, admire, condemn, lie to yourself, lie to your conscience, forgive yourself, forgive others, all in silence. Love. You can love in silence. You usually do.

Which leads to the second kind of silence, where you find yourself from time to time, surrounded by, engulfed in—that greater silence, to which all other silences run, when you realize that we are all part of the same poem, the same vast poem that began in the first cosmic spark and will end at the last amalgamation of the stars—a limerick, a sonnet, a fucking epic to which surrender becomes a kind of understanding. It’s as if sound, all sound, constituted an intrusion people invented because they could not stand the overwhelming power of that silence. We Cro-Magnons knocked off the Neanderthals because we could not bear their silence. That’s Murph’s theory anyway. The Neanderthals, bless ’em, had the horse sense to keep their mouths shut. Da would have approved of the Neanderthals.

Take the silence of Jesus and Mary when they were starting out. Will you? She rocking him in that stable. So quiet. Silent night, holy night. Not a bang or a whimper. Just sitting and rocking there, in the presence of absence, serene and dazzled by the mystery in which both were involved. This silence in our ears, in our blood, that roars at our imaginations. We can’t take the din. We love the din.

On the island, the silence began in my little bed, then seeped out under the door of my room into the kitchen, where it flung itself from wall to wall, thence to the road outside the cottage, on which it hesitated at first, then took off like a bat out of heaven, and ran to Gallagher’s field, where the men were making rope, thence to Synge’s Chair, thence to the Atlantic and America, where it beat Columbus by a hair and settled in Jamestown and Plymouth and the great New York, which gave it the star treatment for a while, until it realized it had to go west and farther west, curling round Cape Horn, and eventually sailing east again, reentering my cottage and my kitchen and my sheets.

IN THE LAST FIELD on the left, just before the land slopes to the sea, lies silent Cait, beneath a murder of crows. They pace and strut. Their interest in death is purely edible, not standing on ceremony, but rather stomping noiselessly, looking at one another or at the rocks, perpetually in motion. What Thomas Gray would have made of this site I can only guess—the one-grave cemetery, not holy enough for a churchyard. Home tombing. They bury family dogs like that.

The rain’s tracery on the windows distorts the picture for those inside the cottage, the scene concealed in ice crystals. Perhaps they don’t look out anymore. Perhaps they have forgotten that anything resides there with the crows and rocks, the dark gray of the earth with which Cait, by now, has merged. I do not forget. Under turgid clouds in this perpetual motion city far away, I raise Cait.

DID YOU THINK I’d forgotten the brain scan? Okay. I won’t offend you with the old joke about the scan showing nothing, because in fact it did indicate that my wonderful brain is ebbing a bit. Some science shit about my beta-amyloid plaques, and my neurofibrillary tangles, to say nothing of my reactive gliosis. I could have told Dr. Spector all that beforehand. She showed me the image, saying that my scan revealed hippocampal atrophy. Could have told her that, too. Christ, any hippo that has been camping out in a man’s brain all these years is bound to atrophy. So what do you make of all this, doc? I ask the little cutey. Nothing yet, she says. But I can give you a blood test, something new, that can tell you if you have the e-4 gene, and are likely to develop Alzheimer’s. There’s nothing certain about it. You could have the e-4, and be okay. In any case, there are new experimental drugs to slow cognitive decline in high-risk patients. Would you want to take the blood test?

Why do you ask? I say. Because a lot of people would not want to know, Mr. Murphy. If the results are positive, they might get withdrawn, depressed. Withdrawn? Depressed? I say. Not I, doc. If the test shows I’m not going to get Alzheimer’s, I’ll dance a jig, of course. But if it shows I have that little e-4 sucker, I’ll dance a jig, too, though I might forget I did it. Win, win, doc. That’s what I say. If you and Máire know I’m getting Alzheimer’s, you’ll treat me so much better, more sympathetically. Think of the stuff I’ll get away with. Poor Murph. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Sings in the courtyard. Strangles Danny Perachik like a dog. By the time I’m caught, my guilt will be a moot point. Bring on the test, doc.

She regards me as if I were an experimental animal myself. Hmm, she says. The same wiseacre who was intent on subverting all these procedures a few weeks ago is now gung ho to try anything. I wonder if you’re experiencing what they call a “final lucidity” that sometimes happens to people at the end of their lives. Yes. That must be it, Mr. Murphy. A final lucidity. She studies my face. Joke, Mr. Murphy. If you’re scared, I don’t blame you.

Me? Scared? I say. Well, I didn’t want to lie to her outright. So we make a deal, the doc and I. I shall take the blood test to learn if I’m programmed to lose my mind. Fate, do your stuff. If the test proves positive, I’ll go for the experimental drugs, too. What would I have to lose? I can’t wait to call Máire, to tell her that her old man has come over to her side, and is at last taking care of himself. Oh, Dad, she says. I’m so happy. When will you take the test? What test? I ask.

WHAT I MISS MOST, Oona, it’s curious, I know, is the first time we met. Here’s why. Because if I could have that moment back, I could savor you rather than savor me savoring you. You have no idea how lovely you looked that day, like a gesture linking intelligence, sex, and grace, all bundled in you. A look capable of understanding and forgiveness on the large scale—not forgiveness for this transgression and that, but rather for the whole race, as if you were embracing all human ecstasy and error in your smiling eyes. When Greenberg introduced us—Oona, here’s Tom Murphy. He’s a poet—your look had interest in it, so naturally, vain cockhead that I am, I thought about myself. Was she impressed at meeting an honest-to-God poet? Did she like what she saw? I wondered only how you were judging me.

If I could get that first meeting back, I’d cut me out of the picture and focus only on you. That’s how I’d make best use of the time. I’d hear only your voice and behold only your smile and lose myself in the experience, the way Keats talks about dying into life—lose myself and dream into you, as I try to dream into life when I write. I would stop all the clocks around us, too, so that we might freeze our moment, freeze the shot the way they do in movies. The brown redness of your long hair, the firmness in your face, your shoulders, arms, would be there before me. I would lack for nothing.

There were times over the long years when I’d catch you catch the light. Standing in the park, or in the hallway. Unaware that I was watching. And then you would see me, and you would be embarrassed by my admiration and shoo me off with a wave. If I notice a similar light these days, I picture you under it. That’s but one of the things that bring you back to me. A little girl on a trike looks like Máire. A piano playing somewhere in the building. A crash of dishes on the day you cracked your hip. Someone sings “Come Rain or Come Shine” or “True Love.” A tapping on a pipe. I hear your two-step. All connections are welcome to me, and precious. My endometrial dancer.

But if I could have just one moment back, it would be that first meeting, which was like a word one puts in a poem, a noun probably, since nouns contain the power of things. A word you search for all your life. And who shows up bearing that word but the great Greenberg? Figures. The word, the one and only word, standing in front of me, extending her hand.

UNTITLED

for Greenberg

(draft)

If at last I wandered

Past the monody of the surf

Into a place of pure beauty and kindness,

What would that look like? I ask you.

You walk ahead of me. You ought to know.

Summer grass on fire? The screaming of a beast?

I have been pursuing you

To ask about all this. And now that I am near,

You say there is nothing to report. We have wandered

Into a place of pure beauty and kindness together,

You say. We are unmoored, you say.

Is that not sufficient?

Truth you will not tell.

Truth is for later.

WINTER ENTOMBS US. Trees icicled. The rivers, padlocked. Our hearts, padlocked. The ball bearing of the Earth grinds its gears toward the light at last, and the sea, solemn sea, sheds its discipline. I am five, on the strand tonight, looking for a sign. Even now, at this frightened age, one feels the shadow of truth. I have lain under the cold stars at night before Ma called me in, yearning to remember something I never experienced. I knew who I was. Beside the white, beaten stones, I watched the sheep huddle, and the unbroken horses and I knew who I was.

How slick the petals of the ocean as they bloom again. How fierce, how businesslike the tern in its hieroglyphics. The Earth grinds on its axis, the strident wind goes slack, and the stars are steady as my gaze. I would travel now, if I could. I would walk across the ocean, past the startled fish and dreaming whales until I reached some shore of thought and language. Not this night, though. On this night I am content with a ripple of warm air and the horizon’s ambiguity.

So many times like this, before. So many yet to come, with my dull ignorance cracking open the padlocks and straining toward the spring. I need rigor. I need geometry. I need to settle into a form. My form. Me. I must create the sensibility by which I am understood. How do I know such things, at five? How do I know them without knowing? The way the Earth senses the new season, I imagine, for having known it before. When did I know it before?

AS A POET, I have to believe in God, though I have little affection for the God I believe in and he has none for me, none that he shows, anyway. Yet I must believe, or I could not write words, structure, anything. The whole process of writing a poem is mystical, to me at least, mystical and beyond my reach. Have I told you about this? I begin a poem with an image out of nowhere (where did that come from?), and at once suspect I am part of a plan, and the poem I’ve begun is part of a plan. The process of writing, then, is the progression toward someone else’s design. And who could that someone else be but God. It’s why, I think, whenever a poet arrives at the end of his poem, the moment is always unsatisfactory, a letdown. Because you think: Is this all he had in mind? But there you are, nonetheless, sweating like a pig and breathing hard, and knowing you’ve tried your hardest to fulfill what was decreed, preordained. And, of course, you’ve failed.

It’s why I tend to write simple poems with rocks in them. I have throes of fanciness in me—I have to beat them down sometimes—but generally I dismiss them as fake thinking, as fiddling with knowledge or language for the silly sake of doing it. I know that dandyism does not make for real poetry. Arse poetica. This comes from my da, too. He could not stand waste—of time or behavior or language. He’d tell me, Most talk is horseshit, but not as useful. So he always spoke in a straightforward way, putting one word in a slot where a lesser man would have stuffed three. Thus every word he said was, to me, beautiful.

There is a connection between this simplicity and my feeling that a poem of mine has been written before I write it, that I am tracing the original drawing, the way children trace. And, in that same way, the tracing is different from the drawing beneath it, even if it follows the lines as carefully as the child is able. As a poet, there is always something uniquely yours in the traced work, something your own that even the original artist may not have divined. Like those copyists of the Old Masters who were compelled to leave a clue that they, mere copyists, existed too. And to reach that point in a poem, it is best to keep the language simple, like my da’s, so as not to muck the thing up.

What happens, then, even though you know you have failed to follow the plan perfectly, is that you’ve done something worthwhile on your own, imperfectly. You have kept it simple, but it is not simple. The poem has taken you to the edge of the sea, to the point where the vast sea is revealed. And though you know you cannot re-create the sea, with all its welts and fathoms, with its treasure ships half buried in the sand on the bottom, among the kelp, and its killing fish and its killing winds and manacles, still, you have brought yourself to the brink of revelation on that shore. And the beginning of revelation is, for all intents and purposes, revelation.

You never crash if you go full tilt. It takes a kind of courage to write a poem—my ma’s and da’s courage, and Cait’s courage, and Oona’s, when she was certain she was doomed, and Sarah’s courage too, when she was little and knew that she had to live all her coming days in the dark, and yet got on with it. The courage to gun it, even though you’re predetermined to fail. Because between that certainty and the attempt to refute it is life, boyo—dreadful, gorgeous life.

HOW DO WE KNOW that God isn’t in Hell, and Satan in Heaven, where he started out? Whose word do we have to go on? Dante? Milton? Literature is literature, my esteemed geniuses, but those poems of yours are just grand guesses. What if God simply couldn’t take Lucifer’s complaining and posturing and Sturming and Dranging day after day, night after night, and decided to pack his bags, get out of there, and go straight to Hell, to put as much distance as possible between himself and that irritating cocky bastard. And once that happened, let’s say that Lucifer calmed down and remained in Heaven among his fellow angels, who never gave a shit about him anyway, happy that the pious asshole was out of his sight, yet sulking that he had no enemy in his weight class worthy of railing against, or usurping. And let’s say that these two impressive personages have lived in both locations all along, from the start. So we have Lucifer out of place among the vanilla goody-goodies, and God sitting around with the fire and brimstone, and a bunch of cackling junior devils. Wouldn’t those newly dead people assigned to one place or the other be in for the surprise of their lost lives when they got there. Good would be mixed in with evil, evil with good. And God would exist in eternal confusion. And Lucifer, too. Just like the rest of us. Thus spake Murph.

JACK LEFT SARAH a voice mail. He was safe. He was happy. He had found “the love of my life.” He hoped Sarah would “understand.” He apologized “for causing you so much pain.” But a man “has to follow his heart.” He didn’t know what else to do, so he’d “just bolted.” He hoped Sarah would “find it in your heart to forgive me eventually.” He thanked her for “all their great years together,” but he was sure she had recognized that their marriage had “gone stale.” That was it, Sarah told me. After eight years, a voice mail. What a mess, Murph. He’s a mess. That’s one word for it, I said. Her voice went in and out. She was having trouble completing sentences. She stammered. Are you crying, Sarah? Not for him, she said. Not for our marriage. It’s just sad, Murph. I thought I’d forgotten how to be sad.

ON A DARK EVENING in the early 1900s, Synge was boarding a train in the west, headed for a celebration in Dublin honoring the memory of Charles Parnell, the great nationalist leader. A wild crowd filled the station platform, many of them from Aran. Hooligans and drunks, for the most part. In the carriage compartment, a little girl from Connaught was seated next to Synge.

When the train started moving, a fight broke out among soldiers. The women who followed them were in a rage, too, cursing and swearing. Soon the women shifted moods from anger to lamentations, equally frantic. The little girl beside Synge began to cry, while a sailor in the compartment talked nonstop with what Synge described as “a touch of wit or brutality and always with a beautiful fluency.” Nothing appealed to Synge more than the wild temperament of the west.

The girl began to shed her shyness and allowed Synge to point out the countryside that was coming into view in the dawn light. He described the trees to the girl, who was too small in her seat to see out the train window. He described the shadows of the trees. “Oh, it’s lovely,” she said. “But I can’t see it.” Her quiet appreciative presence contrasted notably with the strange wildness of the elders, and this mixture of moods made up the spirit of the west of Ireland to Synge—all of it moving east on a train full of people bound to pay homage to the dead Parnell. Would Sarah like Ireland?

ENTER MÁIRE, bearing plans. Apparently I need to get out more, to walk a mile a day, and focus. I need to focus. You’re at sixes and sevens, she says. Thirteen, I say, and ask if this is another numbers test. She snarls. It’s always worth getting Máire riled, just to see Oona again. Same rippled brow. Same scowl. I picture her scolding her clients. She does wonders with other people’s money. That much I know. A guy I met at a reading told me, your daughter’s a genius. I gave him a free book. My genius jabbers on. When a word of mine slides in edgewise, I ask her how she’s doing. Got a new boyfriend. She says I’d like him because he reminds her of Greenberg. Gay? I ask. Not so you’d notice, she says. I’d like to put her on top of a cake.

Who’s that in the picture on your desk? she asks. Dad. Daad? A wicked smile and a brightening of the eyes. Do you have a girlfriend? Nah, I say. That’s just a new friend. Uh-huh, she says. Uh-huh, I say. Uh-huh, she says. Christ. Am I blushing?

Know what she does the day she tosses Fuck Hughie out on his ear? She comes over and sits where she’s sitting now, and before her mother and I can dish out the predictable bromides and consolations, she tells us, don’t worry. The two of you taught me to play fair and square with the world even when the world doesn’t play fair and square with me. I’ll be fine. I wanted you to know that. I tried not to look over at Oona because I knew she was bawling. I couldn’t see anything anyway, though eventually I made out the Kleenex. Ach Murph. You sentimental old fart. How about a drink? Don’t mind if I do.

So, I’m thinking she’s about to go, when she says the three dreaded words. By the way, Murph, her voice slower and more hesitant, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. By the way, she says, William and I are moving. I have a new job offer. Big and important, Murph. You’ll be proud of your little girl at last. She knows I’ll say, Always have been, so I say it. It’s a huge investment company, she goes on. Billions, all over the world. And I’m in charge of a chunk of it. My eyes narrow. And just where in the world will you and William be going to be in charge of this chunk? I ask. London! She tries to make the word happy, but of course that’s impossible. London! My outcry echoes into the misty centuries. London! As in London, England? She laughs. Is there any other kind? she says. Well, that takes the cake, I say. You sashay in here and announce not only are you moving away from your poor old father, but that you’re kidnapping the best friend he has in the world in the bargain, livin’ the life. Taking my grandson into the house of the enemy.

Please don’t look at it that way, Dad. This is an amazing opportunity for me, and for William too. New country. New schools. And no Murph, I say. You can visit us, she says. We’ll come to you. It’s just a few hours away. It’s a civilization away, I say. But, she says, you can see why I’ve been concerned about you living on your own. I wanted to make sure you were looked after before we took off. Even if you have that e-4 gene, she says, Dr. Spector’s on the case. I think, Whoopie! My eyes grow narrower still. And did William know about this? I ask. She says, I just told him this morning. And what did he say? She gulps. He said, Is Murph coming with us? Whenever my heart sinks, I get belligerent. Oh missy, I get it now. London, fucking England, is just a few hours away when it means a social call, but it’s a distance of light-years when you’re in charge of a chunk of the world, and can’t be bothered to think about your old man’s mental health.

Now she looks the way she did as a little girl, when she thought she’d done something to displease me. And, as I always did then, I relent. It’s her life, after all. And this all may be for the best, as I am thinking about my falling asleep when I should have been watching William—though, Christ, what will I be doing walking in Central Park without my little man beside me? I give her a hug nonetheless, and tell her it’s great and that she’s great and the job sounds great and that I’ll be great, and that I’ll swallow my pride and try to learn to speak English. And I dance her out the door before she can see my fucking eyes.

DEAR SARAH, I got me a Perkins Brailler because it’s unnatural to be on the receiving end all the time, without writing back. I hope you don’t mind, but you can’t expect an Irishman to keep his big mouth shut too long. Bad for the lungs. He’ll suffocate himself. I’ve been thinking a lot about Aran lately, my Inishmaan. Did I write that? My Inishmaan? Have you ever been to Ireland? If I drive out some of my darker memories, the way Saint Patrick is said to have driven out the snakes, the place returns to me as beautiful. Full of brave, kind, and gracious people. And lots of laughs. A red rag on a hedge. That’s what it is. A flash of life and color caught in a hard place with thorns. But the thorns reveal the color of the rag as much as the rag reveals the thorns. A red rag on a hedge. I think you’d like Inishmaan. As ever, Murph.

PS. There never were any snakes in Ireland in the first place. Patrick was full of shit. Maybe my dark memories are fiction, too. You never know.

PPS. Tonight I plan to go out in the courtyard and sing “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” I’ve done it before. Lovely tune. Do you know it?

PPPS. I’m giving a reading at the 92nd Street Y next Wednesday night. Want to go? With me, I mean.

YOU NEVER CRASH if you go full tilt. Sure. But one morning you look around, and you’re the only driver on the road. You can say that has nothing to do with your attitude. You are Mario Andretti at any age, and you go go go whether others are there or not. And there are no more cigarette butts in the ashtrays, no more ashtrays, or big laughs and not a drop taken where once it was taken, and you thought you heard a cough but it was a dead limb cracking and falling, well then, all you have left is the books to stave off the obvious. That, and a few ripe berries.

Through the Christmas season, TCM shows a montage of the people in movies who have died during the year. Why do I weep at the sight of Greer Garson, Ronald Colman, Lana Turner, Elisha Cook Jr., Van Heflin, Butterfly McQueen, and Burgess Meredith? I knew them not. Yet they were part of my life, of all our lives. They made an impression. Burgess Meredith, not croaking and creaking in Rocky, but rather Burgess Meredith in Winterset, under the Brooklyn Bridge, young and yearning, with an old, crackling-cellophane voice way back then. But it’s not just the movies we saw these people in. They went full tilt, you see. People in movies have to go full tilt, because their lives are compressed into 90 minutes or 120. And you realize that they too, the gone, surveyed the scene at some point in their lives and saw all the others gone. They left the theater alone, and hunted for a cab.

What I love about being a poet is that I see the world as a poem—a thing that lives between the lines, between the nodes, as Sarah puts it. Trouble is, those spaces increase as life increases. Mystery compounds mystery. And then one afternoon you want to say to someone, Look at this. Will you? And as you say that, you glance to your right, and Oona’s gone. And you glance to your left and Greenberg has gone too. And Máire and William soon gone. Not dead, thank goodness. But gone. They become part of the space. They add to the invisible mass. Do I want to be the last man driving, only to assess the empty world as existing between the lines?

There’s much to say for space, much to say for my da’s gone leg, except when there’s nothing to contrast it with. Burgess Meredith. Whenever they invoke The Twilight Zone’s greatest hits, they trot out old Burgess, wandering the wasteland city in search of peace and quiet and something to read. When he crushes his eyeglasses underfoot by mistake, that’s supposed to be the tragedy of the tale. But the tragedy comes before that, when he wanders around and no one is there. It wasn’t a small tragedy—poor Burgess not being able to go into seclusion with his beloved books. It was the greater tragedy. He could not see other readers. Maybe I ought to join AARP after all, and enjoy the many benefits of membership.

My hands loosen their grip on the wheel, and I shoot forward into the empty supermarket, and out again into the empty stadium, and out again. I drive to Bethlehem, Paris, Akron. Not a soul anywhere. I drive to Tinian, whence the Enola Gay took off for sleeping Hiroshima. I drive the runway, now weeds and midges, built extra-long for the weight of the bomber. Nothing there. Nothing in the hospitals in Galway. Nothing in the swimming pools in Mamaroneck, or in the Belnord courtyards, either one. Nothing in the New York Public Library, not even Burgess Meredith. I blast through the stacks, going a hundred, maybe two. Look. No hands. Go Oona. Go Greenberg. Go William. Go Máire. From here you look like berries.

In memoriam, everyone. Much love.

AFTER THE READING, we go to a bar on Third Avenue, with photographs of dogs covering the walls. I describe some of the dogs to her. She asks how they are dressed. We chat about this and that, but not about Jack. I’m relieved. I think she is, too. She says she liked the reading, but thought the Q&A afterward was a waste of time. Always is, I tell her. A novelist friend of mine deliberately times his readings to end within ten seconds of the hour allotted, so as to eliminate room for the Q&A. Even so, I went to one of his readings where a guy got his question in within those ten seconds. He asked my friend how to get an agent. Some of the greatest Q&A moments occur at the 92nd Street Y, I tell her, because Jews are so crazy. They’re Irishmen, I’m certain of it. Ireland, a lost tribe of Israel. Same gloom, same jokes, same fight in ’em. Same fixation on one point of view. I tell her of the time I finished a reading of poems at the Y that I, for one, thought moving and heartbreaking. A bearded guy in the front row raises his hand, and says, I saw you on TV. Not knowing how to answer that question, I scanned the room in search of another. From the back, a woman calls out, I saw you on TV, too. Then the first guy pipes up again. On TV, he says. I saw you on TV.

Crazy kikes, I say. Crazy micks. I love those words, says Sarah. I know you’re not supposed to say them. But they have such life. Coons. Wops. Yes, I say. And most are one syllable, giving them a special kick. Gook. Hebe. Slope. Jap. Chink. We go on like that, trying to come up with all the delicious slurs and verbal no-no’s forbidden in polite company, all one syllable. Cunt. Fuck. Cock. Tits. Which reminds me, she says. Why are you men so taken with our tits? It goes back to our babyhood, I tell her. We long to suckle. Bullshit, she says. It’s because you’re such an uninteresting gender. Even blind as a bat, I can tell when a man is staring at my tits. Am I staring at them now? I ask. (I am.) Of course you are, she says. If I wanted to make all men happy, I’d wallpaper their houses with pictures of tits, the way these walls have dogs. Bitch, I say. Dick, she says.

DEAR MURPH, I’ve been involving you in a plan about light this morning. Most blind people are able to make out light from dark. I cannot. The condition is called NLP, no light perception. Been this way from birth, which means that all I know of light comes from what others tell me, or what I read. You could say, I’ve been in the dark about light. This may exaggerate the importance of light in my mind. You know? The thing one cannot attain? Not that I have a quarrel with darkness. Sometimes I’m bored with it, the way anyone might be bored with one’s hometown, from which he may never travel. But the mere suspicion of light, the mention of it, is enthralling to me. I picture sailors in a black storm at sea, suddenly spotting the beam from a lighthouse. Or the proverbial tunnel with the light at the end of it. I’ve listened to movies in which a blind person has his sight restored by an operation. The bandages are removed, and oh my! Someday, Mr. Poet, I’d like you to tell me what light is like, so that at last I might see it in my darkness. Think you could do that? As ever, Sarah.

RIDING FAST in the darkness, past a rotted bole, I came to a rock wall. It stood no higher than three feet, an easy jump for me and the horse. We had taken jumps higher than that lots of times, higher and deeper, without hesitation. But on that tarnished-silver afternoon, with the sun in hiding and the sky turned black, the horse refused. At the approach, instead of gearing up the way horses do, it veered off to the side of the wall, and we swung away.

Which one of us refused to take that jump, do you think? In his book, Professor Dodds uses this very situation as an example of the unconscious at work. But long before I read Dodds, I lived the riddle. Who faltered? The horse or the rider? If I say it was I who refused to take the jump, the explanation is rational. At that particular moment on that particular afternoon on the island of Inishmaan, I made a conscious judgment that whatever past experience may have told me to the contrary, we were not going to clear that wall.

But if it was the horse that decided to veer to the side, then something wholly irrational may have been at work in that field. The animal had become the instrument of my subconscious, and for no discernible reason—no premonition of danger, nothing like that—it decided to go its own way. The horse had refused to take the wall not out of fear, but in rebellion to something hidden from us both, and never to be understood by either of us. From such impulses madmen murder, poets write, and old fools fall in love.

GO AHEAD, he said. Plant one on me. Standing next to me at the bar in At Swim-Two-Birds is Jack, out of nowhere, with his hat in his hand, and his face a sea of gloom. Do it, Murph. I deserve it. Give me a shot to the kisser. And he juts out his big jaw. What do you want, Jack? I turn away. To apologize, he says. It’s not me you need to apologize to, boyo. I know, I know, he says. I tried to tell her how sorry I am in a voice mail, but . . . Sarah quoted it to me, I tell him. It could not have been more pathetic. Ya see? he says. Ya see? Pathetic. I don’t even know when I’m being pathetic. But it’s always the same with Sarah, Murph. I can’t tell her about important things, the things I feel, ’cause I don’t know how to relate to her. She’s better than I am. Smarter, educated. No matter what, I screw up. He sits beside me, uninvited. Why don’t you have me apologize for you? I ask. That way she’ll be sure to know it’s bullshit. How’s your colon cancer, by the way, Jack? Acting up, is it? Look, he says. I know I did the wrong thing. But I wasn’t really lying to you. I’ve never had the nerve to talk to Sarah. And Christ, I couldn’t tell her about Peggy Ann. I mutter, Peggy Ann. So I came up with this harebrained scheme involving you. All wrong, I do know that. But the reason I did it, Murph, that was the truth. I don’t have the words.

Boyo, you may have made a career spouting this kind of horseshit, I tell him. But don’t expect me to go along, and clap you on the back. Let me be clear, Jack. I don’t accept your apology. Not because you hoodwinked me. I can handle myself. But you hurt a wonderful woman, who has it hard enough without being saddled with a lying, cheating fuck-off who thinks he can talk his way out of any jam he makes. Jesus, Jack. Look at yourself. You say you don’t have the words. Fuck, man. Words is all you have. What you lack is a sense of basic decency. He turns away.

Give me a break, Murph? A little slack? There are two sides to every story, you know. I roll my eyes. It’s no picnic living with Sarah, he says. I mean, she’s wonderful, like you say. But she’s hard, too. There’s no give to her. And what sort of give are you looking for, Jack? Permission to butt-fuck every Peggy Ann who winks and hikes up her skirt? Now, that’s not fair, Murph, he says. You don’t know Peggy Ann. No, boyo. But I know Sarah, a little at least. And what I know is that all she asks of life is a straight shooter. She cannot see what’s going on around her. She’s vulnerable to every drunk driver, every careless kid on roller skates or a bike, every pickpocket and exuberant joker who gesticulates as he babbles along the street and bumps into her and says, Hey lady, why don’t you look where you’re going! That is what the world is like for Sarah, Jack, which you, more than anyone, ought to know. So, it isn’t too much to ask of the man who’s married to her, who has promised her his love and protection, to treat her as if she exists.

Jesus, Murph. You sound as if you know her better than I do. I signal Jimmy for another. Let me ask you something, Jack. What sort of woman did you think you were getting in Sarah, when you married her eight years ago? You must have recognized how smart she is, how plain damn good she is. How kind, he says, I saw how kind she was, is. I guess I needed kindness. You don’t know anything about me, Murph. Actually, Sarah knows very little herself, because I’m ashamed. Ashamed of my folks who were blackout drunks, and the Quonset hut we lived in near the Navy Yard. And the screaming all the time. And the banging on the walls. And the filth that never washed off. And Mr. Porty next door, with the greasy hands, who gave me a dollar for every blow job. The only thing I could do well as a kid was swim. In the summers I escaped to Riis Park, and when I got big enough they trained me as a lifeguard. That’s how I got out of the Quonset hut. I swam out. The lifeguard board located me in East Hampton. I had enough dough for a room of my own over Starbucks, where I could smell through the floorboards the coffee I couldn’t afford. But at least I was out. And then, early one morning, there was Sarah, walking down the beach like a visiting angel. And I knew soon as I saw her, soon as she knocked me on my ass, that if I could be with a girl like that, I might be saved. And what about Sarah? I say. What did you think you were going to give to your angel? What were you going to do for her? He shrugs and looks down at the floor.

Oh Christ. What am I here? The Grand Inquisitor? I could grill this dumb slob from here to Sunday, and nothing would come of it. Why am I bullying this jackass? I should know by now, people are not to be explained or reformed. We are what we are, what we’ll always be. I never saw a change worth warm spit in anyone past the age of three. And the truth is, Jack isn’t a bad guy. He’s a battered guy, who never received love. And I’m telling you, if you don’t receive love, if you’ve never received love as a child, you’re a goner. Half the kids I grew up with on Inishmaan were Jack—not necessarily brutalized like Jack, but treated as surplus furniture, as junk, just as their ma and da had been treated before them. In their case, it wasn’t parents who didn’t love them. It was life itself.

A writer I know was working on a memoir that, he told me, surprised him the deeper he got into it. He had always resented the killing coldness of his parents. For all his life, he’d hated them. They should not have had children, he said. But you know, Murph? he told me at this very bar. The more I wrote about my folks, this sin and that, I realized that all they were is people, just people. Flawed, sure. Destructive, unconsciously cruel. All that. But in the end, just people. That was Jack—flawed, destructive, unconsciously cruel, yet human. As a poet, I am supposed to understand such things. As a man, it’s more difficult. In the silence between us I find myself resisting the impulse to give Jack a comforting pat on the shoulder.

But I resist it anyway, and spin the big guy around where he sits, and give him a knuckle sandwich, square in his right eye. He rocks back, shocked. Then he laughs. So, you forgive me, Murph?

SHE HAS ME THINKING about blindness. I never gave it much thought before. There was a Portuguese novel I read a long time ago, called just that, Blindness—about a mass epidemic in an unnamed city. Everyone but a doctor’s wife is stricken, and she, because she has retained her sight, is mistrusted and scorned by the blinded citizens. One character stands out: a beautiful girl struck down during casual sex in a hotel room. Tough and icy at first, she is humanized by her blindness, and she takes care of an orphan boy. When she no longer is able to see, she finds that she can dream reality, and recognize the beautiful without seeing it. Perhaps that’s why I can remember her.

Tiresias, Polyphemus, Jesus healing the blind. Milton, of course, and Homer, and Blind Lemon Jefferson and Ray Charles and George Shearing. Others. Once you’re on the subject, the names, real and fictional, roll out. Velázquez painted a blind woman with Sarah’s Madonna-like serenity, her eyes cast down in the portrait. H. G. Wells had a story called “The Country of the Blind.” A sighted man finds himself trapped in a land where no one else can see. He endures prejudice turned on its head.

Sarah’s blindness affects the way I think about her. It lends her a kind of magnetism. I am drawn to her darkness, as if I am able to join her there in the permanently dark room of her mind. Yet her mind is not dark in the sorrowful or funereal sense. It is more like a photographer’s darkroom, in which it takes time for a picture to develop. She is willing to wait. I am, as well. She was born blind, and all she knows of the light comes from what she is told or what she reads. I find her darkness enlightening. My eyesight is improved by it.

One blind old woman I knew on Inishmaan. She scared the shit out of me, perched in a wicker chair before her cottage, all day, every day, even in the rain. She was not frightening because of anything she did or said, but simply because she embodied aloneness. One felt alone enough on the island, without an extra kick in the pants, like blindness or deafness, or being crippled like my uncomplaining da. Sarah feels alone, too, so she says. But I think she is using the word only technically. She appears so self-contained, one feels she needs nothing she does not seek. So she seeks me. That’s interesting, because I seek her. Dancing in the dark?

SHE HAS ME thinking about sight, too, and foresight. During a phone chat the other day, out of the blue she asks how I intend to spend the rest of my life. I think about little else, I tell her. People do tend to go on these days, she says. Ten more years for you, Murph? Twenty? Any suggestions? I ask her. I’ll think about it, she says. What do you see in my future, Madam Sarah? What do your tarot cards tell you? She puts on a sort-of-Hungarian accent. Your future, Meester Murphy? Your future? Better I see your past.

You’ve helped me see, you know, Murph. How so? I ask. Your poems see quite well. You make the reader see. But you never have seen the things I describe in my poems, I tell her. How do you know I’m right? I want you to be wrong, she says, and you never fail me. You imagine things your way, not as they are, which allows me to imagine them based on your imaginings. You make me see best, she says, when you apply your imagination to things that are real, things I know the shape of already. When you write about them, I see them your way. You have a poem about a chameleon warming itself in the tropical sun. I’ve never seen a chameleon, so all I know is that it camouflages itself by adopting the colors of its surroundings. What I did not know—and thanks to you I now do—is that a chameleon takes R & R.

I ask her, Do you suppose I can imagine what I’ll be doing the rest of my life? For that to happen, Meester Murphy, she says, you may need to imagine what you already know.

ARTHUR ZEROES IN on me through the thick Plexiglas window in his cell door. His eyes burn deep in his fur. I do not know what to do. I wave meekly, hoping he’ll recognize me. Arthur! His dark lips do not move. Nothing on him moves. His doctor tells me that he has made not a sound since they brought him in. Silent in his cell, he eats dishes of berries. Sometimes he paces, says the doctor. Mainly he stares, watches. The hospital staff is waiting for a change in behavior, in effect waiting for Arthur to become human again.

Dark, dark. His eyes blaze blackness, like black gemstones in a velvet box. Do you want to kill me, Arthur? Do you want to kill us all? There are no bears in Ireland. They vanished in the tenth century, after the Vikings killed them off for the pelts. I stand at the Plexiglas window for maybe twenty minutes. I do not budge. Neither does Arthur. He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t blink. What do we know? What do we ever know? Bear paws at his side. Bear claws showing. He has scratched himself. Bear blood.

TO IMAGINE WHAT YOU already know. Solitary on the bay side of the island, on the flats leading to the water, were the remains of a cottage consisting of three stone walls. One was the back of the house. Two stood at each end, where the thatched roof once had lain between them. How old the place was—a hundred years, six hundred—no one seemed to know. Do you remember who lived there? I asked my da. It stood just as it is now, when I was a boy, he said. The upper portions of the side walls looked like bookends, with no books in between. They supported only themselves. A road curved off to the right of the house, and the bay lay under clouds beyond.

Throughout my childhood, I kept waiting for the house to fall into ruin, but it did not. No one tore it down, no one rebuilt it. It belonged to no one, just standing where it always had stood, a monument to what Synge, referring to the old empty British manor houses, called the “splendid desolation of decay.” Was it incomplete? I wondered, since it had been complete at one time. I felt that you called something incomplete only if you thought it was heading, or hoping, for completeness. The house was complete in its incompleteness.

Sometimes I’d take it in from a great distance, viewing the house as part of the whole Inishmaan landscape. Then it looked small to me, incidental. Sometimes, I’d stand inside the three walls, among the grasses and the weeds. Then the house seemed to constitute the world. Once I stood within the walls during a rainstorm, trying to hear what the family to whom the house had belonged and to which it belonged in turn, would have been speaking of, as the rain beat down on the thatch all those years ago. There’s a leak on the east side of the roof, said the ma. The pa said, I’ll see to it in the morning.

CHRIST WAS PREACHING up a storm on St. Nicholas Avenue, when I happened by. Kids paused their game of stoop ball to laugh at him and his sermon on greed and luxury. Just you wait, he told the kids, beseeching heaven for their sins. And in a New York minute, sure enough. A storm.

Do they who live here feel the strangeness that I feel? There is no sign of it. Inishmaan, Manhattan, the same. The people live where they live, and I as well, with them. Yet to me, a solitary fisherman, the bitter rains, the plumage of the ladies, the mad laughter of birds (etc., et al.), exist in a luminous incompleteness, like that three-walled cottage, as if I, and I alone, their distant, present cousin, had been created to perceive the whole. The glowing restaurant, the smoke-glass reservoir, the doorman in his epaulets, the family’s promiscuous maid, Arthur the Bear—who lives where I live? Hello, stranger. I am greeted by the owner of a bookstore I haven’t visited for years. Hello, stranger. She has no idea.

And the people in my building. I’m sorry to learn they complain about me and have no affection for me, ’cause I have tons of affection for them. Botsford of the blue Vespa. The Lewises. The DeBoks, natural aristocrats, whom I see every Christmas at the local soup kitchen dishing out grub. We just nod. Says everything, a nod. Mr. Jones, a widower like me, but more dignified. Who couldn’t be? And Dr. Berman, the only Belnord resident crustier than I am, who grumbles past me in the hallways like a cement mixer. I speak his language. I grumble back. And relentless Mrs. Ginnilli, who keeps trying to collar me for her book club meetings, so that I’ll talk poetry with the ladies. We need your brains, Mr. Murphy, says the sweet thing. Oh, I’m sorry, Mrs. Ginnilli, I tell her. I’m having my brains removed next week. All of them adorable, admirable, and to me, magical.

Time was, I am told, there was more magic in the world than world. And the red eyes of daisies and the men who spoke reindeer were as common as rocks. Whenever you wanted something, anything, you needed to do nothing but dream. Say you wanted the morning light to be condensed into a hunting bow, or to spend Easter vacation on the far side of a mirror. You had only to say so. And presto. Magic. Bring back the dead for a dance at Roseland? For one last spin around the floor? Not a problem.

DEAR MURPH, I wanted to tell you how I drowned my brother David. I was eight. He was two. We were with our parents on the beach in East Hampton, on a rainy Sunday. No one else was there, as far as I could tell. My folks never left David and me alone for more than a few minutes, and they would tie a little rope around his waist and around my wrist, so that I would feel it if he tugged. That afternoon, I had brought a braille copy of Little Women to the beach and I was lost in it, so I did not notice when there was no tension in the rope. Where’s David? My mother fairly screamed from up the beach. David? David! We all cried. I felt the rope that had been around his waist, slack in my hands. There was a lot of screaming of David’s name, both from my parents and from others elsewhere who had heard the screaming. I just sat where I had been, Little Women in my lap. In a few minutes I heard police and ambulance sirens. I remained sitting. My father cried, Oh God! Oh God! My mother was hysterical. I did not move. My face felt paralyzed. There! There! A man’s voice. And people running in shoes on the sand. Someone said, Again. Someone else said, Keep trying. A great silence followed, and I continued to sit and listen. Finally, I heard a terrible weeping from my parents, and their footsteps as they approached my blanket. They said not a word to me till we were home.

DEAR SARAH, I wanted to tell you how I drowned my best friend Cait. We were eighteen, and had been on-and-off lovers, but mainly friends all our lives. In a place as small as Inishmaan, a good friend is a treasure, and Cait was that to me. She had the heart of a lion. Her death too, like your brother’s, occurred on a beach. We were there one spring evening, the two of us, looking out toward Galway Bay and the mainland. Cait brought a jug of poteen, our Irish homemade hooch, and we were getting pretty smashed. I was half dozing, when Cait thought it a good idea to take off her clothes and swim out to a rock island sticking up out of the bay. She was always doing daring stuff like that, and I thought little of it. I should have swum out with her. I knew she was drunk. And then I saw her slip off the rock and go under. When she didn’t surface, I went after her, swimming around the rock, and calling her name the way your folks called David’s. Funny about that. We call out the names, though we know it’s no use, as if the sound of the name itself were a lifesaving measure. But I did find her, and brought her, still alive, to the shore. Her eyes swam in her head, and her limbs were limp. By the time we got her to the hospital in Galway, she was as good as dead, the doctors said, brain dead. When I’d carried her from the water, she felt light as a sheet of paper.

I LIKE THIS GIRL, Oona. I’m telling you now in case anything develops between us, and I don’t want you saying, Isn’t this a fine how-do-you-do! The truth is, you would not be surprised that I like her, at least not any more surprised than I am. Love comes to old Murph one last time? I don’t know. It may not be love yet. But as the song says, it’ll do until the real thing comes along. It’s just that I feel a strength in her, akin to yours, and a basic goodness, akin to yours, and a horse sense akin to yours, too. She isn’t you, old girl. No one could be. But she has something that gets under my skin, in a peace-giving way, as if I knew her a long time ago.

There have been but three women in my life, that is, if Sarah qualifies as the third. One I found and lost on Inishmaan. One to whom I gladly gave my heart and vows. You know that one. And now this girl, who steps in so quietly, you’d hardly know she’s there. Oh, nothing will come of it, most likely. There are more years that separate our ages than years she’s been alive. And she’s got a husband, to boot. God knows where. But still. And I really don’t know if I have any love left in me, after you.

Her being blind? You might worry about that, since I’m having a little trouble taking care of one person, who at least can see what he’s messing up. The odd thing is, she makes me quite comfortable with her blindness. She gets around well on her own, but that’s not what I mean. Most of the time, I do not notice that she’s blind. I guess age does that to you, makes you focus on what counts. And she seems comfortable not being able to see me. I try to tell her of the glory that she’s missing. She fires back that my mind is so dazzling, she does not know if she could survive the blaze of my physical beauty. You can see what I like in her. It’s you.

What she sees in me, I have no idea. Apart from my manly manliness, brains, and rugged good looks, I mean. Frankly, I don’t really know if she sees anything in me at all. But she sees, this blind girl, Oona. She sees.

Of course, if Sarah and I do get together, I’d have to divorce you, since I still feel married to you. But divorce it must be, old girl. Sorry about that. Alert the Church and the Holy Father. Oh, is that so? you say. And divorce on what grounds? you say. The oldest, I say. Infidelity. With Heaney. And don’t deny it. Heaney bought the farm less than a year ago. And I know you, Oona. You always liked him better than me, and now you have your chance. I’ll divorce you for playing around with Seamus, shacking up in heaven. And you’ll both live in disgrace among the angels. Just like Adam and Eve. How do you like that apple—my dearest, darlin’ love?

I WHISPERED, “I am too young,”

And then, “I am old enough”;

Wherefore I threw a penny

To find out if I might love,

“Go and love, go and love, young man,

If the lady be young and fair.”

Ah penny, brown penny, brown penny,

I am looped in the loops of her hair.

O love is the crooked thing,

There is nobody wise enough

To find out all that is in it,

For he would be thinking of love

Till the stars had run away

And the shadows eaten the moon.

Ah penny, brown penny, brown penny,

One cannot begin it too soon.

DEAR MURPH. It occurs to me that you may be wondering why a glamorous exotic beauty such as myself would be wasting her glamorous exotic time with a possibly demented, hoary fellow such as yourself. So here goes.

They’ll tell you love is blind, but not for the blind. We need to know what we’re doing. And if ever we do behave as though love is blind, or should be, we wind up with our geese cooked, as I did with Jack. I’m not angry with Jack. Pissed off about there being another woman, of course, but that’s more human reflex than anything heartfelt. I’m sorry for Jack. I’ve always been sorry for him. He has a knack for making people feel sorry for him, which is how he gulled you with his cock-and-bull story about dying. There’s a sweetness and basic goodness about Jack, but his true, virtuoso gift is making people feel sorry for him. And I wonder now if I originally fell in love with him because he was in worse shape than I was, and I could take care of him, and feel less like an object of pity myself. We may have shared an eight-year marriage consisting of the blind leading the blind. Who knows.

No one feels sorry for you, Murph. You won’t permit it. And that’s one of the things that draws me to you. You work at one of the most selfish jobs there is—a writer. Yet your view of everything goes outward. If I employed a guide dog, it would be you (though I’d need a steel muzzle). And though you sometimes appear lost, you really aren’t. You use the feeling of being lost to discover someplace better. It’s where your poems come from, I’m sure of it, and where I discovered you long before we met. Your poems are unalloyed generosity. They reach for the reader’s lost soul, and say, Let’s lose ourselves together, and see what place we’re in.

And this, too, about your poems: you never end a thought on one line without beginning another thought on the same line. Is that because you don’t think anything ends? You fear death but do not believe in it, sort of the opposite of how you feel about God. Right? Nothing ends. So you’re old, but you have no age. I have no idea what sex would be like with you, if you don’t mind my raising the subject. But I’ll tell you this: if ever you and I do wind up between the sheets, I’ll bet you it will go on and on and on, like one of your lines. And wouldn’t that be fun for me, for a change.

When you’re blind, you learn everything from something else. I know the location of my front door when my knuckles brush the top of a ladder-back chair in the kitchen. When I feel bread crumbs underfoot, or coffee grounds, I know it’s time to sweep the floor. The dry leaves in a flowerpot tell me to water the flowers. You may think, how limited her life. In fact, it’s an arrangement of endless expansions. Every element betrays its position by relating to another element, and you know the world by these implications.

So it is that I know the world through your touch. You take my hand when we walk, and you think you’re protecting me. I appreciate the gesture, but the pleasure’s all mine. I love touching you, and you touching me, however grazingly. I love brushing against your shoulder, accidentally or not. (You think I can’t see where I’m going.) I love it when we sit side by side in a tight place, and our knees touch, bone to bone. I love to grasp your elbow, or laugh so hard that my head collides with your chest. I love the feel of your flat palm on the small of my back when you steer me from behind. If you had to reduce all the reasons for my attraction to you, it would be this nonreason. Pure unreasoned touch. So this is what I think you wanted to know, dear Murph. You are my braille.

UNDER MY FRONT DOOR slithers a letter from my landlord offering me $500,000 to give up my apartment. Since $500,000 is more money than I make most weeks from my poetry, I give the letter my rapt attention. After some de rigueur niceties about how honored the Belnord has been to have me as a tenant for the past forty years, the letter goes on to cite my “erratic behavior” in recent months, of which my landlord has been apprised by the filthy, greasy, creepy crawly Daniel A. Perachik. Would I not be happier and safer, posits my landlord, in an assisted living facility, where people could look after me. Teary am I that he and Perachik are so concerned about my welfare. His proposition is worth considering for a second and a half. If I took the money and ran, would I be the superstar of my nursing home, king of the living assisted, with half a million simoleons to toss around? Think of how many kazoos I could buy. Fuck ’em. We Irish are used to evictions.

Simoleons, yes. Never been much interested in money, but the terms for it are grand. Simoleons. A conjoining of Simon, British slang for “sixpence,” and Napoleon, French slang for “Napoleon.” Moola, smackers, loot, long green, a five-spot, a fin, a tenner, a grand, lucre, dough, dead presidents, cabbage, Benjamins, bones, folding stuff, large, sawbucks, a wad. I’ve spent a lifetime shooting wads. Poets do that. We cannot bring ourselves to care about the stuff. When Auden had a place on Second Avenue, he was so poor he was starving to death. One day, Christopher Isherwood paid him a visit and discovered a check for $10,000 in a letter from Auden’s publisher, buried under a pile of papers, that the poor man had neglected to open.

The main reason I’m so bad with money is genetic, because I’m Irish. Sure, there are a few rich Irish, like the Kennedys. My own Máire makes other people rich. But in general the chips don’t suit us. The whole idea of money goes with high-hatting and putting on airs. We can be loaded, all right, just not that way. And whenever one of us has money to burn, he usually does it. Besides, poverty serves our literature. In Liam O’Flaherty’s “The Informer” (speaking of Perachik), no sooner does Gypo Nolan get ahold of his twenty pounds of flesh for turning in Frankie McPhillip than he blows the reward money on booze, talks too much, is found out, and shot. There isn’t a single Irish play, not Synge’s or O’Casey’s or Behan’s, where the central problem could not be solved by eight or nine pounds. I toss the landlord’s letter.

Then let the sleet and the mist and the darkness descend.

We’ll wing our cries above them till the end.

—John Ennis, in Thomas Murphy’s

Book of Dandy Quotations

IF NOW YOU’RE EXPECTING me to paint the scene at JFK when Máire, William, and I are saying our good-byes, and bawling like bleating sheep, with William’s little arms locked around my neck and Máire choked with sobs, and I a wreck-and-a-half, knees buckling, barely able to stand—well, you can whistle for it. I’m not going through that again. What I will tell you is that once they were safely off, I headed straight to an airport saloon, downed nine fingers of Jameson (three glasses, three fingers each), and dumped myself into a cab. And I will also tell you that, reeling into the Belnord courtyard, I decided that this would be the night for Botsford’s Vespa. So I snatched the key off the hook in the office and started up the blue beauty. At this point, I could also tell you that I jumped aboard like a cowboy bandit, and gave the engine a few revs, and took the darlin’ blue-eyed devil for the ride of its mechanical life, shooting round and round the courtyard at sixty. I could tell you that. But what really happened was that I tripped on the kickstand, and the Vespa toppled over on my right foot. And everyone in the building heard the banging, and stuck their heads out their windows like gargoyles. And Botsford ran downstairs, and good guy that he is, was more worried about me than the Vespa, and half carried me to my apartment, where I hit the bed, fell into a drunken sleep in my clothes, and dreamed that I was visited by Marilyn Monroe, Zero Mostel, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, the two men in drag like Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis. Then we all sang “Runnin’ Wild,” with Isaac on sax, Zero on bass, and Marilyn on the uke. How about that?

HOW TO LIVE OLD

by Thomas J. Murphy, PC, DDS, CPA, AARP

Being old and alone is not all it’s cracked up to be. Yet the last stages of living can offer great fun and many rewards if one pays heed to a few basic tenets. The following rules of conduct are intended for those who have just crossed the border of their seventies, and anticipate living on into their nineties. What should I do to make the best possible use of these added years? How best to spend my time? I’m glad you asked.

1. Cultivate your most irritating qualities. This rule may seem counterintuitive, because you have bought into the idea that old people should be sweet and wise. Well, first of all, you are not going to get any wiser in old age than you were in young age. In fact, you are likely to become a great deal stupider, and even on those rare occasions where you luck into a wise solution to someone’s problem or to one of your own, by the time you are prepared to implement it, you will have forgotten it. As for sweet, why should you strain for that? It goes against all normal human inclinations. And if you walk around with a marzipan smile on your puss all the time, you will be taken for an idiot. Everyone who is not sweet (the world’s great majority) will take advantage of you. No. What you must do is to discover the most annoying qualities you displayed before you turned seventy, and triple their intensity. If you were cheap, behave so parsimoniously that your former self will seem profligate in comparison. If occasionally you were irritable, become a full-blown crank. And don’t let up on any one of these tendencies. What you want is for all those around you to make your excuses for you by shrugging and sighing, ah well, he’s old.

2. Ever a dull moment. Excitement is an overrated reaction to things, usually events we anticipate, such as seeing a new promising movie, or meeting a new promising friend. Inevitably all such promises, when realized, turn out to be disasters, so why not cut them off at the pass? Lower your expectations, not just a little. Lower your expectations to the subbasement. By your seventies, life has taught you that nothing is as predictable as disappointment, so listen to your broken heart. To be sure, you will not get much pleasure out of this exercise, but it passes the time, and you can always congratulate yourself on how wise the years have made you, though they haven’t (see Rule #1).

3. Develop a good false stare. Old people spend much of the time staring, anyway, so no one will know when you’re faking it. But your stare need not be as vacant as it appears. An old man’s stare is useful for girl-watching, for instance, without giving offense. To anyone observing you, including the object of your attention herself, it will seem that you are hypnotized, or dead, and she might even give you a sympathetic if condescending smile. I enjoy staring at the trees in Central Park. I appear to be engaging in the old brainless pastime, when in fact, I’m counting the number of greens in a grove. Sarah says she stares all the time. People think she’s merely being blind, but for her it’s a mode of contemplation. Naturally, the best thing about a good stare is that it keeps people from talking to you. Any activity that keeps people from talking to you is a good activity.

3a. And don’t worry about being impolite. Politeness is for occasions where nothing is at stake. You never heard anyone say, Pardon me for ruining your life.

4. Watch your step, literally. After the age of seventy, you should regard your body as scrupulously as a garage attendant inspecting your car for dents. I walk up and down stairs (down is worse), as if I were stepping from stone to stone in a mile-wide Irish creek. I am as graceful as a tank. So hesitant and awkward am I descending a staircase, I have had frail schoolchildren come up to me to ask if I’m all right. Of course I’m all right, I bark. Remember when your bones were not twigs? Remember when you didn’t think about your bones? Remember when you had muscles on some of them? Remember when you didn’t devote every hour of every day to exquisite self-inspection? Aw, fuck it.

5. Do not attempt to make amends with past enemies. This is a common inspiration in old age, to be dismissed from the mind as soon as it enters. Oh, you’ll feel cleansed and noble when you write old McMinus, and tell him, after all the long years, let bygones be bygones. But once McMinus writes back or phones, or worse, meets you for a drink, you’ll remember at once why you hated the bastard in the first place. And now you’ll hate yourself. Nothing is so satisfying as a well-placed bitterness. Enjoy. In a similar vein, suppress urges to visit old friends. They’re fine as they are, and things can only get worse. Ditto for class reunions. These lurches lead nowhere. Relax.

5a. And if you have no enemies? Where’s your sense of judgment, man?!

6. If you find yourself saying, I’ve wasted my life, you will. Don’t say it, even if you can prove it. It’s my experience that only men whine about such stuff. Women, smarter, just get on with it. Juno v. Paycock. In general don’t despair, and if you must, don’t force your despair on others. It’s unfair to add your despair to theirs.

7. Save the world. Age affords an excellent opportunity to save the world. But you’re running out of time. Know what gets Murph? He’s lived seventy-plus years without having rid the world of barbarians, tyrants, traitors, cowards, bullies, murderers, liars, thieves, crooks, backbiters, and grinning accommodators. Also, he has not cured the world’s diseases, from sniffles to the Ebola virus to endometrial cancer. He has not prevented droughts, floods, tsunamis, tornados, cyclones, and earthquakes. He has not eradicated poverty, famine, waste, ignorance, or bigotry. He has not stopped the glaciers from melting or the trees from falling. He has not put an end to injustice, or even to casual cruelty. Neither has he established freedom and goodwill everywhere. He has not seen to it that everyone leads a useful and productive life, and exhibits only tenderness and generosity toward one another. He has not unified the races, or equalized the genders, or protected and educated the children. Nothing he has done, not a single line of a single poem, has resulted in a complete global reformation. In all his seventy-plus years, nothing. Disgraceful.

RABBI BEN MURPHY

Grow old along with me.

The rest is yet to be.

The last of life for which God made the first.

Goodbye to mates and friends.

Hello to (Christ!) Depends.

You only have rehearsed for being hearsed.

PETITION. THE RESIDENTS OF THE BELNORD APARTMENT HOUSE DEMAND THE EXPULSION OF THOMAS J. MURPHY FROM THE BUILDING AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. MANY OF US HAVE COMPLAINED OF MR. MURPHY’S PUBLIC DISPLAYS IN RECENT MONTHS. HIS LATE-NIGHT SINGING IN THE COURTYARD, IN INAPPROPRIATE DRESS AND IN AN INEBRIATED CONDITION. HIS CONTINUALLY LEAVING HIS FRONT DOOR OPEN, AS WELL AS HIS ATTEMPT TO BREAK INTO MRS. LIVINGSTON’S APARTMENT. HIS CARELESSNESS IN HIS KITCHEN, LEADING TO A NEAR FIRE IN THE BUILDING. MOST RECENTLY, HIS ATTEMPT TO STEAL MR. BOTSFORD’S VESPA AND THEN PUSHING IT TO THE GROUND, AWAKENING THE RESIDENTS. THESE DISTURBANCES HAVE PROMPTED THE OWNERS OF THE BUILDING TO ASK MR. MURPHY TO LEAVE, TO WHICH REQUEST MR. MURPHY HAS NOT RESPONDED. WE THE UNDERSIGNED SUPPORT THE OWNERS’ EFFORTS IN THIS REGARD. ONCE SIGNED, THIS PETITION WILL BE PRESENTED TO THE BUILDING’S ATTORNEYS FOR IMMEDIATE ACTION.

DANIEL A. PERACHIK

SUPERINTENDENT

TELL ME WHAT I see, she says. I position her, as if she were posing for a portrait. Synge’s Chair never looked lovelier, the rocks tinged with moss and orange-iron. Even the scraggy fields glow green. She is wearing an Irish sweater she bought herself for the trip, and with her hair blowing about in the cold sunshine, you never would know that she was not born and reared in my native land. In certain poses, at certain times, Oona would take my breath away. Sarah takes my breath away here. It has been a while since I felt a surge of happiness, or freedom for that matter. I clasp her by the shoulders, and kiss her for the first time, at long last. She kisses back. Enough of that for the time being, she says. Tell me what I see.

Directly in front of you, the rocks of Synge’s Chair are mostly flat and arranged in a semicircle with a narrow opening to the right through which you entered, I tell her. The line of the Atlantic is narrow from this vantage point. You see a blue slash of water, as if an artist had moved his brush under the horizon with a lateral sweep of the hand. Above that, the sky is a mixture of blue and white, the white wispy and hazy, coquettish, vague. It stands out against the black rocks directly before you.

Ah, the rocks, she says. You love the rocks. I do, I say. One sits in Synge’s Chair, I tell her, and automatically the eye goes to the sea and sky, skipping over the very sight that makes the sea and sky beautiful. The topmost rock looks like a hog’s skull. The one to the left of it, a caveman’s head with a protruding jaw. Both rocks rest on one that resembles a stubborn potentate with a white nose. He is wearing the two rocks above him as a headdress, perhaps a pair of turbans. To the left and right of him are two children rocks, leaning on their da. I see it, says Sarah.

In the crevices of the rocks lie secrets, I tell her. Notes and poems and fragments of thoughts people wrote a thousand years ago, rolled them into scrolls, and stuck them deep in the dark damp holes, too deep for us to reach. If we listen attentively, we can hear the messages buried in the holes. But they come out jumbled and incoherent, so rather than try to make out the words, we hear them all combined into a solemn piece of music. Monks’ chants. I am trying to hear that music, says Sarah. But what more can I see? The sky is changing shape, I say. The white clouds swell in a pulse, and are larger and more pronounced. Do the rocks change as the sky changes? she asks. If you look long and hard, they do. Yes, I say. She says, I’ll look long and hard.

What’s to the left of me, Murph? Flat land sloping. Green, gray, white, and then the sea, I tell her. Now here, from this perspective, the line of the Atlantic appears much thicker than a brushstroke, and the blue is deeper, stronger, like a decision made and stuck to after much waffling. It is definite, the right decision. What has been decided? she asks. You’ll have to ask the ocean, I tell her. Three white-walled cottages crop up where the green meets the gray. From here they look quite small, I say, like the toy houses provided with electric train sets. One has a tin roof, and a red door. The doors of the other two are black, and the roofs are thatch. If one peers closely, it appears that the white wall of the tin-roofed cottage has strands of silver and blue in it, like swimming herring, and pink flowers growing at the base. One of the flower heads is bowed in meditation. You can’t see it from here, says Sarah. You’re making that up. I am, I tell her. She smiles.

Inside the cottage with blue and silver fish in the walls, I go on, a couple sits reading in frayed chintz chairs. How old are the couple? she asks. He’s seventy-two. She looks to be in her early, perhaps midthirties. Early, says Sarah. Definitely early. Anyone can see that. So, they are father and daughter? says Sarah, forcing her face into innocence. Let me look closer, I say. No. The way their bodies are angled toward each other, they appear to be lovers, or man and wife. The two being mutually exclusive? says Sarah. What are they reading? Can you make that out? I tell her, I can’t see what the woman in her early thirties is reading (the Sarah smile), but the man has a book of Ben Jonson’s poems. Wait. He’s reading “His Excuse for Loving.” Do you know it? Sarah shakes her head. The print is too small for me to read, but by a lucky coincidence, I know the poem by heart. That is lucky, says Sarah. What’s the poem about? she asks. It’s about the love of an old man for a much younger girl, I tell her. Never happens, she says. Recite it?

Let it not your wonder move,

Less your laughter, that I love.

Though I now write fifty years,

I have had, and have, my peers;

Poets, though divine, are men,

Some have lov’d as old again.

And it is not always face,

Clothes, or fortune, gives the grace;

Or the feature, or the youth.

But the language and the truth.

She says nothing, but rather turns her head to the side. What’s to the right of me, Murph? To the right of you, the land begins with boulders, then slopes down past the stiles to the sea that looks different yet again. Here the water is tinged with pink and gray, and appears less definite, though not wishy-washy. More like someone accustomed to ambiguity. On the shore, several seagulls stand tall and still, as if listening to instructions. They face east, every one of them. The grasses around them are yellow-green. The sky directly over them shows a gray funnel at the top. Are there more rocks on this side of me? she asks. No, I tell her. Here it is clear, save for a donkey about fifteen yards away, standing as still as the birds. His belly is a brownish gray, and his legs and face are white. He seems both drowsy and anxious. If you were my grandson, William, I’d tell you the donkey has wings, great golden wings. Does he have wings? asks Sarah. Yes, I say.

What else is there to see, Murph? Well—scanning the scene again—there. How did I miss that? Someone has created a tall stack of flat stones in the shape of a giant beehive. Really? she says. Yes, I tell her. I mean, really? she says. Yes. This is true. It’s quite remarkable. Must be seven or eight feet high. And there are two sheep on either side of it, standing like royal guards. Why would someone build such a thing out here, asks Sarah, where no one will see it? I could make up something about man controlling nature, or art for art’s sake, I tell her, but my guess is that whoever built the thing simply did it to see if it could be done. A beehive made of stones. Like a poem, says Sarah. Like a poem, I say. Was that all there was to the Ben Jonson poem? she asks. No, I tell her, it goes on.

With the ardour and the passion,

Gives the lover weight and fashion.

If you then will read the story,

First prepare you to be sorry

That you never knew till now

Either whom to love or how:

But be glad, as soon with me,

When you know that this is she

Of whose beauty it was sung;

She shall make the old man young,

Keep the middle age at stay,

And let nothing high decay,

Till she be the reason why

All the world for love may die.

She is small, silent, motionless in Synge’s Chair. Is that everything? she says finally. Do I see everything there is to see? There are two more things, I tell her. Over the top of the rock pile behind you, you can make out the horns of a cow with a white head, and brown eyes staring. Horns, she says. How do you know it’s not a bull? It’s a cow, I tell her. You can tell by the size of the head. And if I were to go around to the other side of the rocks, there are other ways of telling a bull from a cow. And the second remaining thing I see? she says. That’s me, I tell her. Me looking at you. Oh, she says. I always see you, Murph. I’ll sleep with you tonight, I say. You’d better, she says.

HOW WILL I KNOW it’s you at the door? she asks, because we have separate rooms across the hall from each other in the B and B, and Mrs. McGeary, our hag of a landlady, gave us the fish eye when we registered. I tell her I’ll knock four times—two knocks followed by a pause followed by two more knocks. And I’ll be as quiet as a mouse, I say, because if Mrs. McGeary senses any hanky-panky, the whole of greater Inishmaan will be giggling at us in the morning. Well, says Sarah, you might not make much noise with your four knocks, but the two of us may be making a ruckus after that. We may just have to live with the giggles.

To tell you the truth, I was wondering if I could get it up even once after all this time, but the wondering evaporated at the sight of Sarah. I knocked my four knocks, and she opened the door naked, her body spotlit by the light in the hall. Murph? She laughed. This had better be you. I got it up once, and I got it up twice, with a half hour’s interval. And after the second time, we lay in the cool sheets, with the smell of turf around us, and her sweet head resting on the white hairs of my chest. After a long silence, we said I love you, at exactly the same time, as if each of us were disclosing a secret. And right after that, her cell phone made the voice mail sound.

SOMEWHERE A CHILD CRIES tonight. A wailing, then a whimper. Outside my window branches appear then disappear. The wind blows them into view, then takes them away. If you pay attention, you can hear the air shrink in the cold. Nowhere near the Atlantic, I can see it nonetheless, on two shores. It rears up and gallops from here to Inishmaan and back. I can make out every wave and whitecap. I can make out the lines in each whitecap, and the tangles in the lines. Dr. Spector spoke of the end of a life attended by a final lucidity. Is this final lucidity? When I had the chance, I should have asked the doctor if the term meant the last moment of lucidity, or lucidity at last. I feel a surprising strength.

NASA says it has discovered 715 new planets with its Kepler Space Telescope. With my naked eye I can detect 633. There is life on four of them. One is green. One is secular. One is populated by sculptors. One, by gossips. As for our terra firma, a frosty fog has obscured the particulars. But just beside it, or above, or below (it seems continually to shift its position, like the branches) I see the not at last, the world’s not, and it is as clear as a bell, or a raindrop—every petal booming and clanging. Thank you, Professor Dodds. The final lucidity is the world’s not. I should tell someone. Whom should I tell? To whom should I report my newfound clarity? I am Ella Fitzgerald singing “All through the Night,” pitch-perfect. So run my dreams.

Cold, cold. I should mind it more than I do, dressed only in pajamas, and no shoes. I don’t know. It feels balmy, like Greece perhaps. Is this where vines grow out of the planks of ships? I crave gaudier miracles. They dwell here, somewhere, I am sure of it. I shall find them. We shall find them. Together we shall oversee Máire and William, Sarah, too, and Arthur, and my homeless beauties, the sullen carriage horses, even Jack, even (am I about to say this?) Perachik—all those who need oversight from our place of difference, our irrational world. Will I write poems here? Less lyrical, I think. More like the old heroic stuff created not because more heroes were in abundance in the ancient then, but rather because poets felt the need for heroes so urgently, they were compelled to bring them to life.

But I also may do no poems in this place. Maybe there are no poems here. Maybe those who live here feel that poetry has had its day, the product of an elementary stage of evolution when the race was conscious of itself but little else. Maybe we are supposed to be the poems.

See here. A rose full of stars. Wells in the riverbanks. A keyhole in a badger. A sword swallower with bright blond hair and a love song stuck in his gullet. The painted windows of a church rattling in tune. Thatch. Turf. Uncertain loveliness. I walk warm paving stones, like ellipses, toward a Dionysian freedom disrupting the degrading monuments, the square this and the locked that, striding from the clinging snow into spring again. My birth lies in the raw silence of the day of the week beyond Sunday, the death beyond death, a cloven light. Lucid, pellucid. Final, eternal. When all that one has known or been withdraws, what then? Where am I standing, or not standing? A rustling from behind a pyramid of sedge. Darlin’, is that you?

IS THAT YOU, Mr. Murphy? I think so, Mrs. Lewis, I barely say. She is standing with her husband in front of me near the fountain in the courtyard. I must have wandered here in my sleep. Oh, my dear man, she says. Let us walk with you back to your apartment. You just returned from Ireland. Didn’t you? You must be jet-lagged. Yes, jet-lagged, I say. You’ve been very kind to me. Very good neighbors. I’ll miss you both. Are you going somewhere, Mr. Murphy? says Mrs. Lewis. The petition, I tell them. I’m sure you saw it, even if you didn’t sign it. They’re tossing me out on my ear.

They stand there stunned, she with tears in her eyes. And I am moved that this lovely woman, whom I know only from the building, is crying for me. And she is, but not in the way I’m thinking. Don’t you know, Mr. Murphy? she says, touching my arm. There wasn’t a single signatory to that ridiculous petition. Not a one. Unless you count that wretched nosy parker, Perachik. And he won’t be with us much longer, if the Tenants Committee has anything to say about it. No, no, no, dear Mr. Murphy. We tore down that petition the day after you left for Ireland, and all your friends and admirers in the Belnord got together, and agreed to tell you that, and to tell you why. Don’t you know how we cherish you, Mr. Murphy? Why, man, says Mr. Lewis, you’re our poet. You’re our music. We’d kick out Perachik in a shot. But you? You’re the music.

Speaking of which, it turned out, according to the Lewises, that no one had objected to my singing in the courtyard. They liked it. And no one gave a shit about the open doors, or about my trying to get in Mrs. Livingston’s apartment, especially Mrs. Livingston. Botsford was tickled that I admired his Vespa so much I’d try to ride it. As for nearly setting my apartment on fire because of the eggs, Mr. Lewis said that half the tenants do that, and that he himself left his coffeemaker on last Labor Day weekend, and it burned a crater in the kitchen counter. Jones, Berman, and the DeBoks took up a petition insisting that I stay put. And Mrs. Ginnilli’s book club has decided to dedicate the year to all my works, and voted that I must attend every one of their meetings as punishment, and explain myself. I am teary, and the Lewises are teary, and by the time we mount the steps and stagger to the elevator, the three of us look like drunken sailors err-lie in the morning.

I DON’T KNOW what else to tell you. The voice mail Sarah received from Jack heaved with remorse and contrition. He was full of shame, and full of sorrow, and he begged Sarah to take him back. He even quoted me (without attribution) from our chat in At Swim-Two-Birds, saying how smart and good a person Sarah is. I wasn’t moved, and I don’t think Sarah was either. But, as much as she loved me, she said, she would give him one more chance, or, as she put it, one more look. She had said she was cursed with feeling sorry for Jack, and so it seemed. I said nothing. Much as I loved her, what was there to say? One of the reasons I adored Sarah was her sense of honor and fair play. Who would I love after Oona but such a person?

On Aer Lingus back to New York, I told her I thought she was doing the right thing. The difference in our ages was a cold fact. Even if I do have another twenty years coming to me, when I finally go, she’ll be in her fifties, with no husband and nearly half a life spread out before her like the Gobi Desert. Sarah answered that the trouble was she was too old for me, and she had a point. But what was real was real. The rocks.

And there was the matter of the prospect of my incredible shrinking brain. And if it happens that my bloody system does contain the e-4 time bomb, and that my memory is on its way out, why on earth would I want to hand this blessed girl one more disability? Her response was like her. Everyone is disabled, she said. Love exists for our disabilities. And if love were the only thing to consider, she continued . . . But then her voice trailed off, and she fell asleep on my shoulder for the rest of the flight.

Máire and William are coming over in a few weeks, so that’s a good thing. I’d thought of visiting them when I was in Ireland, but I wouldn’t have wanted Sarah to travel home alone. And my black Irish mood was blacker than ever, so why expose Máire and William to that. I haven’t worked on Oona’s poem in a while, or Greenberg’s, but I’ll get there. I have a new book in mind, too. Only a title so far. Stone Harvest. In the meantime, there’ll be readings here and there, and appearances where I’ll play the public man and yearn for home. Sounds corny, I know, but there’s nothing in a poet’s life like doing poems. In the morning stillness, my coffee, my chair, my legal pad, my mulling. For now, I pour myself a nightcap. Sláinte.

In bed on Inishmaan, I’d asked Sarah if she’d given any more thought to my question, What am I doing the rest of my life, and she sang, Spend it all with me. Naturally, that was before Jack’s message. Yet she was right. What should one do with the rest of one’s life? Spend it with Sarah. If you can’t do that, shoot yourself. And if you won’t do that, do whatever you did before the rest of your life. What you did in order to get to the rest of your life in one piece. You lived. So live. More noisily than ever. Court life. Woo the fucker. Sing it a love song. Belt it out at the top of your lungs. A pure restatement of the original theme. You never crash if you go full tilt. What is articulated strengthens itself. Sing it. In the courtyard, in the ashen sea, the muddied air, the bloodstained snow, the blackthorn bush, the damp straw, the field, the turf, the cold-eyed stars, and in the rocks, the rocks, the rocks. Sing it.

GOOD NIGHT. A bit of reading before sleep? Yeets? Too wiped. The soft hills of the coverlid. The sweeping tides of the sheets. I dive and tumble toward dreams, when something rattles the house. Two knocks followed by a pause followed by two more knocks. Have I told you about this?