Poteen

--Irish moonshine, Sligo

So much for that other famine;
there were vicious spirits in the potato still.
At eleven sharp the keepers rang the bell

and three chaps slipped-in as if summoned,
on cue, as if they'd done it before.
One pulled the green shade to the floor;

another locked the red door, to admit
among us only the whole world of those three,
the two who veritably lived behind, and me.

So how come there were nine
at one o'clock; I counted nine three times,
and all in one conversation, one dream,

and I was in it, too. Children as old men
and one lady who wasn't actually, confessing
talk over occasional passes of the poteen,

they'd surrendered to the sheer labor of performances.
Each spoke to seven others on stage.
They kept three fingers in my glass; the bouquet

was delicate wild flowers floating in kerosene
and I was choiceless as Adam when his only Eve
asked whether there was anything he'd like to eat.

The pub spun, spilled in circles, the dame
touched finger to jug, to sealed lips
to tell me I've come to see, just listen.

What you protestant boys call science,
she might have said, we know as snakeskins,
so pay attention. When eternity began

we were poor before God, and our pants
pockets imitate our souls to this very hour;
the justice of laughter is the only Irish empire

you'll ever see. Let whoever wants other
pay the price of it. The one incapable of hatred
gets sad and funny angers to chew-on instead.

Remembering all is the vice of mercy, remember,
and nationally we drown in memory for a living,
the Trinity's straight-men in the joke of everything,

talking openly with the dead, the gone, the unseen
as much as to each other, honest off all maps,
but at escaping blame for the Divine Joke masters.

Don't our escapes make heaven bitter-green!
We're the best at finding art in coincidence,
who were forced to pull away the masks of pretense

that things merely actually happen, an old
man's ice-cream of an idea. Our Dads'
potato booze beats it, our Dads', who said

Give us, 0 Lord, one thing, your own cold
love of details and we'll get-up merciless
humility enough to laugh at the wickedness

of your helpless pleasure in making it
though we be trashed by that love daily
and humiliated at the bank as Guatemalans.

In other words, we were Chinamen in China, taken
by the worlds we got rid-of by joining
by three a.m., all we could bring

to life with bittersweet, hand-me-down themes;
a day, a street, only needed naming
to be answered duly with a counter-summation.

They smiled grievously as demons on poteen;
my eyes swam in goodwill lost enough
I had no self to be self-conscious of.

Generations were on stage all at once
and whole parts of sentences sufficed to name
salient episodes by four a.m.

So this is the joke of mercy, the stone's
silence opened-up, the cruel kindness,
heart's foolery for love performed in mind.

So this is the other dream we dream to make
our dreams tolerable. I found the door,
the street, the pub gone among dark stores,

and hitched out to Drumcliff Church the next day
to Willy's stone and the round crosses, to a knowing
dark as squid's ink: our Fathers stole

our lives, before God, to squeeze-out
their own, and then left in the old charade
of dignity. Are leaving forever in parade,

dragging a thousand years with them, no doubt
denying what the dead really covet for dinner,
whose breath is cut flowers over the hymnal.

They did what they had to do, and made-up
ideals ex post facto; in the discrepancies
thereof they found a freedom, in nothing less.

And those who left, who couldn't forgive Europe
a word, most especially it the word was peasant?
Nor all her sensual ennuis, however pleasant?

Nor even Mother-Church, with whom she conspired
to by-pass the lives of the grovelling volk
with a spiritual punch-line to the dirty joke?

My Catholic Mom was such an Irish one,
who quit her people for a clever German lad
for whom soil was normal. And here I am

with my commandments of fear and love, and desires
breathless as poteen in chilling night air.

First published in "Milkweed Chronicle"