I was in the "Deux Magots" in Paris one time and an American that I was introduced to asked me if I had known James Joyce. I said that I hadn't that honour, but I told him my mother had often served a meal to W. B. Yeats in Maud Gonne's house on Stephen's Green, and that the poet turned up his nose to the parsnips. "He didn't like parsnips?" said the American reaching for his notebook. "You're sure that is factual?"

"It is to be hoped," I replied, "that you've not called my mother a liar?"

"No, no, of course not," he said, "but she might have been mistaken – it might have been carrots," he added hastily.

"You must think I'm a right fool to have a mother that can't tell a carrot from a parsnip," I said nastily.

"No, no, of course – I mean I'm sure she could but it is very important...." He wrote in the book: Parsnip – attitude of Yeats to.
          — Brendan Behan, in Brendan Behan's Island:
                                              An Irish Sketchbook

I've this image of the poet hammering lobster on the flagstone floor.

They've been to the fishmonger's in Carrigaholt, bargained for a pair of behemoths, brought them back to Moveen to be boiled and now, bottles uncorked, spuds ready, butter drawn, the small room blurry with steam and hunger, they find that they've no utensil sufficient to liberate the sweet meat from its hard shell casing. Thus the hammer, the "flaggy floor," and the "sense of a feast that had been fought for," the poet sends word in a note: "Great debris and great delight."

It's all metaphor – the lobster, the hammer, the flagstones, the feast – one meaning carried by another, as if "to bridge" (if we trace the word back to its Greek) the gap between what is and what really is.

I stole that thing about the bridge from another poet, who read it somewhere or stole it from another one or made it up. It's what we do: rent to own, borrow, steal – make things up and metaphor. Sometimes nouns are transformed into verbs. You may try this at home.

Poets can't help themselves. Everyone of them – stone mad for double meanings, second helpings, things that are more than they seem. Or less. "All the world's a stage," writes Shakespeare. We bow to the audience that isn't there. Adjust our costume. Memorize our lines. Imagine "all the world's" watching, waiting, listening. They never show.

It was a poet who told me to go to Ireland. And poems that first made me want to go. And poetry that keeps the lights on now, in the house that Nora Lynch bequeathed to me.

The first living poet of my acquaintance was teaching at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, in the fall of 1967. I took Professor Michael Heffernan's class in American Authors – Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, and Poe. Because he was young and apostate, Irish and American, a variously lapsed and observant Catholic, we became fast friends and drinking buddies. At his rented house on Brown Road, fifteen minutes from the campus, we studied Yeats and a variety of domestic and imported whiskeys and the Boston Symphony under Charles Munch. In this house I heard my first Mahler, drank my first Irish, and saw for the first time poems in the making. Each left me breathless and wanting more.

                                  KENNEDY

One late afternoon I hitched from Galway down to Kinvara on the edge of the Burren, one of those long midsummer days when the sun labors at last out of all-day rain and sets very late in the evening. In dark pubs all up and down the street, the townsmen hunched to their pints, silent and tentative as monks at supper. Thinking to take my daily Guinness, I stopped, and Kennedy was there, his picture on the mantel behind the bar.

A black-headed citizen half in his cups sidled over and smiled. Ah Kennedy Kennedy, a lovely man, he said and bought me a Guinness. Ah yes, a lovely man, I said, and thank you very much. Yes Kennedy, and they slaughtered him in his youth the filthy communists, he said, and will you want another. Yes, slaughtered him in his youth, I said and thanked him very much.

All night till closing time we drank to Kennedy and cursed the communists – all night, pint after pint of sour black lovely stout. And when it came Time, I and my skin and the soul inside my skin, all sour and lovely, strode where the sun still washed the evening, and the fields lay roundabout, and Kinvara slept in the sunlight, and Holy Ireland, all all asleep, while the grand brave light of day held darkness back like the whole Atlantic.

Heffernan's "Kennedy," drafted, corrected, revised, and retyped over the space of several months that autumn and winter, was elegant to me, bearing as it did the beauty of homemade words on the page. He called it a prose-poem and said he had an interest in the form. The idea that any day in any bar anywhere in Ireland could produce such a text produced in me the grand illusion that any parish in Holy Ireland was more inspiring than any place in suburban Michigan. Old monkish men, the ocean and light, Kinvara and Galway, talk of Kennedy and sour, black, lovely stout all seemed impossibly distant to me, and wonderful.

And poetry. The idea that an ordinary life in southern Michigan could produce a share of extraordinary words I owe to Michael Heffernan, because he was the first I'd ever seen – the first living poet with a Buick and a business suit and designs on a life that included an eventual marriage, a mortgage, and a full-time job, instead of the apparently requisite style of poets then – driving off into the late-sixties sunset in a rusted VW bus in bell-bottomed jeans, old sandals, and more hair than I would ever have. Here were poems that stung the heart about wanting women and the way that light shone on things, figures of plain force, myth, and history – and I knew that Ireland figured into it. What was more, though the moment that produced "Kennedy" could be traced to a bar in a small town in the golden, open West of Ireland, the work that produced it had been done in a bungalow on Brown Road near Pontiac, Michigan, in the shadow of auto factories and the interstate. One could come and go, traveling light in the portable universe of words, counting on images for transport.

In the course of the next couple of years, I introduced Heffernan to his first wife. He introduced me to Roethke, Berryman, Frost, and Bishop. He and his missus moved off to southeastern Kansas with a U-Haul to live in a big house and teach in a small college. He started publishing his poems in the quarterlies and journals. She grew more and more discontent. In February of 1970, I left for Ireland.

The book I took with me was The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. It was a hardbound blue book with the author's monogram embossed in gold on the front cover. I had a few of the poems or portions of them off by heart.

When you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book

This seemed so excellent to me, warming my shins to the sods in Moveen that first winter I spent there decades ago. And Tommy Lynch, my cousin and namesake, his Wellingtons still wet from mucking about after milking his cows for the evening, would sit there at seventy, smoking his Woodbines, listening to my recitations.

"By cripes that man's a great one for the words – that William Butler Yeats, sure faith he is." And when I'd pass the book to him, he'd read it out with the precision he'd learned from the Moveen National School on the Carrigaholt road when he was a boy.

"Now for you, Tommy!" Nora would say, busy with the evening's tea. "You'll have it by heart like a shot! Sure faith." We were an odd trio – the old bachelor, his spinster sister, the blow-in Yank with his poetry and pocket watch – the room full of longings and imaginings, futures and pasts, the godawful winter lashing out of doors.

The notion that a book, a book of poems, could speak to one's beloved in her age, and say things that the poet meant to say but never could; and maybe quicken in her the caught breath, the look, "the soft look," Yeats called it, "your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep" – this had a powerful appeal to Tommy and to Nora and to me. It was, in my twenties, the sure faith that time, distance, and life's imbroglios could not trump love. Most days in my fifties I still believe it and I believe that in their seventies Tommy and Nora did too.

Beyond all of which there was the sound – the iambics and the rhymes – the acoustic infrastructure that made the saying of it such a pleasure. The ten-syllable line with its five thumps – this pentameter – echoed my own internal meter. I could walk its walk and talk its talk – daDum, daDum, daDum, daDum, daDum: when You are Old and Gray and Full of Sleep.

Of course, I made the requisite Yeatsian pilgrimage, hitching to Kilrush and Ennis, thence north to Gort, then on to Coole Park to see the swans and the tree with the great man's initials in it and on to Ballylee where the ancient tower stands, albeit not in the ruins he predicted, with its bridge and river, the broad green pasture, the hum of the motorway out of earshot, jackdaws diving from tree to tree. And carved on a stone there by his instructions, the inventory of "old mill boards and sea green slates/ and smithy work from the Gort forge," with which he had "restored this tower for my wife George" – the briefer line, the solid rhymes, the declarative confidence, like the music country people danced to. Lucky enough, I thought, to marry a woman named George – if only to rhyme her eventually with "Gort forge."

I slept in Galway that night. Then on to Sligo, where, following the poet's instructions, under bare Ben Bulben's head, I found Drumcliff churchyard and the grave upon which I cast as cold an eye as I could muster, said my thanks, and went away. I walked around the Lake Isle of Innisfree, located the waterfall at Glencar and the rock at Dooney where the fiddler played.

I was young. Poets were my heroes. Where they'd been is where I wanted most to be.

So I wandered around Ireland as long as I could, night-portering in Killarney, learning to milk cows and manage dung in Moveen, reading Yeats and dreaming of the future, wondering what my true love's name would turn out to rhyme with.

For most of the next two years, I vacillated among travels in Europe, the job at my father's funeral home, and an undirected course of study at the university.

In August 1971, I was in Venice with my friend Dualco De Dona, who had moved back to his family home in the Dolomites. We'd done the Grand Tour – Greece and Vienna, London and West Clare – back and forth and ended up at breakfast on the Grand Canal, in the salon of the Hotel San Cassiano, variously aching, as the young do, for art and love, some direction to life, and a future that included poetry.

Restless, broke, and mildly hungover, unable to articulate any of life's purposes, I rose from the table like a man of parts, settled my accounts, took the vaporetto from Accademia to the train station, where I rented a car, drove to Milan, boarded a plane for London and Detroit, and by that evening was dining at my local Coney Island talking about the Detroit Tigers with my brother. It was a shock to move so rapidly among the worlds.

Within six months I was married. Within a year I was enrolled in mortuary school. Soon after, the first of my sons was born. We moved to Milford when the family bought the funeral home there. It was June 13, 1974. My life was now rooted and full of purpose – family and funerals, taxes and accountants. It had direction – a wife, a job, another baby on the way, a future.

Poetry seemed a distant music.

In 1975 our daughter was born, in 1978 a second son. The business had grown from a hundred calls a year to a hundred and fifty. I was the president of the Rotary Club and the Chamber of Commerce. We bought a house next door to the funeral home and moved in with a mortgage and the dog. I was working and breeding and building as the young must do – networks, mergers and acquisitions.

By September 1979, my wife was pregnant with our fourth child. The funeral home was humming along. I bought a ticket and flew to Ireland for ten days because the ache inside me for Moveen had grown intolerable. It had been seven years since we'd gone there on our honeymoon. Nora had been to America, and we'd kept in regular contact. But I felt too distant from the place itself and the life that seemed important there.

Nora, now going seventy-seven, was holding her own against age and the weather and the powers that be. We drove up the Clare coast to Galway and bought books at Kenny's – anthologies and literary magazines – Cyphers and Poetry Ireland. We had nights bythe fire with neighbors and friends – talk and songs and stories. The Carmody sisters, schoolgirls then, brought their tin whistles. The Murray girls would come and sing. Nora Carmody brought news of the world. The dear Collins sisters, Bridey and Mae, J. J. McMahon, the Curtins and Keanes – each brought a party piece. When my turn came round – "now Tom," J. J.'d insist, "now Tom, some Yeats" – I'd give out with it: "A Deep Sworn Vow," or "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven," or, if drink had been taken, "Broken Dreams." One night I read from Death of a Naturalist, by the northern poet Seamus Heaney, and watched as those small farmers tuned their attention to the poems' mention of "Toner's bog, good turf, flax-dam, townland," and an account of "when I first saw kittens drown, 'the scraggy wee shits'" tossed into a bucket, "a frail metal sound." This was a language they understood, full of things they were familiar with – hay barns and butter churns and "Turkeys Observed," a "Cow in Calf," an illegal bull – turned out in ways we'd never heard before.

"Good man for you, Tom," J. J.'d say. "Fair play to you."

There were love poems, family histories, a dark indictment of the neighborly racism behind the Famine, and one about the poet's youthful fascination with open spring wells like the one in Nora's lower field or across the road at Carmodys' and about the self-consciousness the older man endures.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

It was all metaphor for the examined life of deep and hidden things – lineage, history, habitat, and language – that give life meaning, purpose, and resolve. The act of writing poems becomes the grown man's mirror, looking into the wellspring of the self, the rhymes "set the darkness echoing," This was, like Yeats, a collaboration of form and sound and sense – the deft balance of self-reference, examination, and manifesto; the willingness to use what is handy to order the world and make one's own reflections relevant. And the evident faith in the language to make its own way, to shape its own course and fluency, like water – that close to nature – it made me feel alive to read it.

In December that year, up the street in the postman's bag with the catalogues and Christmas cards came Michael Heffernan's first slim book of poems, The Cry of Oliver Hardy. It was green and white and hardbound by the University of Georgia Press. It was sixty-one pages. It had his name on the front, his picture on the back, and inside he'd signed it, in broad blue ink strokes, on the title page. "Kennedy" was in it, and "The Plight of the Old Apostle," "St. Ambrose and the Bees," and some dozens more.

These poems that I'd seen years before, on his desk in his office in the house on Brown Road, had become a book for perfect strangers to pull from a shelf in a library or bookstore and read for themselves. The making public of this work he'd done in private – this publication made me wish that I had written some.

How, then, do you find it? In practice, you hear it coming from somebody else, you hear something in another writer's sounds that flows in through your ear and enters the echo-chamber of your head and delights your whole nervous system in such a way that your reaction will be, 'Ah, I wish I had said that, in that particular way. '
          — from "Feeling into Words," in Preoccupations

Heaney's essay offered license, if not to steal, at least to borrow – poetic license – to sing along until the sound of my own voice emerged from what I heard ring true in others.

Finding a voice means that you can get your own feeling into your own words and that your words have the feel of you about them; and I believe that it may not even be a metaphor, for poetic voice is probably very intimately connected with the poet's natural voice, the voice that he hears as the ideal speaker of the lines he is making up.
          — from "Feeling into Words"

By now I was listening for the ideal speaker and had begun to think in syllables and lines, to construct them, to hear the tumblers of the language click into a fit of sound and image and utterance that unlocked my meanings and their own.

And I was "borrowing" with impunity, lip-synching the poets I most admired, plugging my own words into older forms – sestinas and villanelles – to see if I could make them "fit." The rules, however arbitrary, made the rummage for the "right" word wider. For every right word gotten, there were dozens, maybe hundreds, handled, held up, considered, and rejected. It was necessarily messy work. The jettisoned words, scraps of phrases they fit into and later revised away, whole poems or parts of poems, freshly minted in late-night frenzy that would not, alas, survive the morning's scrutiny, littered the workspace. The finished article, the thing well made, was a tiny diamond of a thing, extracted from the universe of words. There was about the enterprise, as the man hammering lobster would say years later, great debris and great delight, indeed.

On Heffernan's instructions, I sent two poems off to John Frederick Nims at POETRY in Chicago. Yeats and Eliot and Wallace Stevens, Bishop and Berryman and St. Vincent Millay had published in POETRY. I figured a rejection from the best was better than from the least. But Nims took them. It was more encouragement than I needed. Then he took some more – one about our old dog, another about my grandmothers, a piece about man caught between competing instincts and cross purposes, immobilized by warring gravities.

I returned to Ireland, rented a typewriter from a shop in Ennis, and went to work on manuscripts in Moveen. Nora called it "the poetry business" and gave me a portion of her table on which to do it. I took the bike to Carrigaholt one day and posted off a manuscript to Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, an editor at Cyphers. I'd read and admired her work and the work of the consortium of Dublin writers – Pearse Hutchinson, Macdara Woods, and Leland Bardwell – who edited the magazine with her. Eilean took two poems. I was internationally unknown.

I was trying to organize a life balanced between the requisite and compelling work that paid the bills and the elective work of the imagination, between the rooted life in Milford and the life rooted in the magical language in Moveen, between a life organized around deaths and burials and a life that required what Heaney called "digging" – and what I thought of as disinterment. And while the everyday enterprise of the local businessman, husband and father, and citizen-at-large in a small midwestern place was one that suited me, the rich life of language, drawn from the idiomatic wellsprings of Moveen and its American cousins, informed by memory and imagination, was a constant preoccupation. Often these lives competed for time and attention. Time spent on one was subtracted from the other. Other times, each seemed bound to the other – the aching humanity, beautiful and sad, that populated the funeral home, often spoke in private, primal tongues.

When the father of a young girl who had died horribly began his daughter's brief eulogy with "The thing you fear the most will hunt you down," the grim pentameter of it stung my ears – da thing da fear da most da hunt da down – the awful iambs coded to his beaten, broken heart.

Sometimes I would see in my children's eyes the knowledge that I was paying only a portion of the attention due their questions and curiosities, while carrying on an invisible word game with myself. The poem I was working on was called "Learning Gravity" and had to do with keeping balance.

Those early publications had occasioned an invitation from poets alive and thriving in Ann Arbor – Alice Fulton, Richard Tillinghast, Keith Taylor, and others – to join their monthly workshop. Since Heffernan, it was the first society of poets I'd known. It made me a better reader and writer and required me to contribute something every month. Most of those poets have become friends for life.

Early in the 1980s, Heffernan and I began corresponding in sonnets. We'd noticed that a three-by-five postcard held a title in caps and fourteen lines of text and could be mailed for fourteen cents. It seemed as though the Postal Service was imitating art. We conspired to carry on accordingly. He'd been divorced and remarried and had become a father by now. My marriage, unbeknownst to me, was on the brink of breaking. Heffernan would write:

MIDSUMMER LIGHT AS THE SOUL'S HABITAT

It wasn't the turning of appearances
nor any of their exactions from the air
that made me think the afternoon was bees
or gangs of bears in rowdy robes of fur.
I hadn't thought of this for any reason
and this wasn't anyplace but my backyard.
Here was the flavor of an illusion
that stuck to my tongue like a hummingbird
beating its wings into a blur of hunger —
one of those tones from the soul's undergrowth
where animals devoid of any anger,
lifting up bits of landscape in their teeth,
would turn to look around them where they were,
loosening their faces into shreds of fire.

In receipt of which I would return:

MARRIAGE

He wanted a dry mouth, whiskey and warm flesh
and for all his bothersome senses to be still.
He let his eyeballs roll back in their sockets until
there was only darkness. He grew unmindful
of the spray of moonwash that hung in the curtains,
the dry breath of the furnace, parts of a tune
he'd hummed to himself all day. Any noise
that kept him from his own voice hushed.
He wanted to approximate the effort of snowdrift,
to gain that sweet position over her repose
that always signaled to her he meant business,
that turned them into endless lapping dunes.
He wanted her mouth to fill like a bowl with vowels,
prime and whole and indivisible, O . . . O . . . O . . . .

Heffernan's part of that year's correspondence became a fair portion of his second book, To the Wreakers of Havoc, in 1984.

For my part, the sonnets were inklings of the storm that would become my family's life in 1984 and end, in early 1985, with the dissolution of that marriage. I retained the house, the kids, the cat and dog, my day job and preoccupations. "Learning Gravity," a longish poem, got published in halves – ninety-some lines in Boston and a hundred lines in Dublin – all in the same month of that awful year. It was, like everything then, divided. I tried to imagine the unlikely traveler who might, by coming upon The Agni Review in, say, the Grolier Book Shop in Cambridge, and taking the plane out of Logan Airport for Dublin and finding Cyphers in, maybe, Books Upstairs in College Green outside of Trinity, reconnect the dismembered portions of the poem, as I had, working back and forth between Moveen and Milford, between Ireland and America.

It was Heffernan, in the late summer that year, who gave me a list of editors and publishers and instructions to send them a book-length manuscript. To each I sent a sample – half a dozen poems – and a cover letter saying I could send them more. The first to respond was Gordon Lish, then an editor at Alfred A. Knopf, who requisitioned the whole collection. Within the week, I had a contract and a small advance. With the money, I planned a trip to Ireland.

In Dublin I'd arranged a visit with Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and her husband, Macdara Woods, who lived in Selskar Terrace, Ranelagh. I wanted to thank them for publishing my work. Their rooms were full of books and manuscripts – the toil of words was everywhere. Both of them were editing Cyphers and she was lecturing at Trinity and they had a three-year-old son named Niall. All of us had new books due out that year. After a night's hospitality, Macdara walked me to the taxi stand. We spoke about Irish and American poets, about the ocean between them, about the interest on each side in the poetry of the other. Across the road a pub – the Richard Crosbie – was turning out the last of its late-night drinkers. It appeared in the title poem of Macdara's book:

STOPPING THE LIGHTS, RANELAGH 1986
2.
It takes some time to make an epic
or see things for the epic that they are
an eighteenth century balloonist
when Mars was in the Sun set out for Wales from here
trailing sparks ascended through the clouds
and sank to earth near Howth
while dancing masters in the Pleasure Gardens
played musical glasses in the undergrowth —
they have used the story to rename a pub
to make a Richard Crosbie of the Chariot

Here, as in life, the epic makes way for the ordinary, the monumental becomes mundane. In the end – this is the good news and the bad – they might rename a pub for you.

• • •

Booking Passage:
We Irish and Americans
by Thomas Lynch

W. W. Norton & Company
New York • London

Copyright © 2005 by Thomas Lynch.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

---

Poetry Daily / Amazon.com

Selected books available by Thomas Lynch:
Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans — Hardcover
Still Life in Milford — Paperback
The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade — Paperback
Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality — Paperback

Search Poetry Daily / Amazon.com for other books: