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| Bantry Bay, 2007 |
An Unskilled Labor
Cork, Winter, 2007
1.
This is how it ends for you
at a strip club in Cork city:
At a busy cafe they seat you
within clear view of a woman
with four friends and six nervous twitches.
You can't imagine four friends --
it takes only a moment to know --
and despite a life of blind angst
your problem has not been nerves.
Other things to be sure, hopes,
vices and sirens, but
those you hope everyone has
but conceals their succumbing to.
Fireman, barkeep,
unskilled laborer,
in 19th Century D.C.
we assumed the immigrant clichés.
2.
And each time she looks up
You are looking at her
and each time you look up
she is looking at you.
Still you stare,
as if from across an ocean
of mutton, salt and potatoes O'Brien
you could regain what is
still fused and probably
here is the cause of her
blinking, her hair twirling,
her shoulder scratching. Her
companions glance your way
but you are careful not
to note the judgement
their reactions might betray,
of your fat face, familiar fate,
your blandness, bland food order,
solitude and especially
your rude insistent stare
across the waves, years, the traumas
that carried you far from her,
that created this abyss
into which were lost the familiar:
a chaffinch song, cabbage,
hairy bacon, politics
and anxiety, loneliness,
song and scent and you
feel raw, unfused, unfit,
unlit, feel the altruistic
desire of the inferior
to flee to free you both
from this strange attractive
beam whose source you seek to define
in these lines and to abandon your dinner seizes you.
And now that it’s time to leave
it means to pass her when
you steal a backward glance
then outside linger
on the busy street, more loiter,
foreign indolent in love
with a rumor of cliché,
waking dreamer-up
of the embodied past.
3.
You find an alcove to hide in
and soon you spy silhouettes
behind the café’s lace-curtained door,
think of the "lace curtain"
Irish your mother spoke of -- which we're not --
and her contempt for their reaching,
resent of their reach,
before contempt became resentment
that we were not. I used to worry
we were less Irish than the others,
the ones who ran in green
who staggered from bar to bar
on March 17,
who named their children Brigid and Pegeen
instead of Tommy and Jimmy, until,
reading Kavanagh, O'Brien
and McGahern,
Kickham and Corkery and Moore,
or stumbling across O'Grady's
"churcheyed fidget fear"
I realized the Irish left in us
was in our silence,
my father's brooding and mine,
in that desperate faith
in Christ and God and the saints,
petitions to our heaven-resident dead,
in the way we thought our troubles a mystery.
And then there was the way
my mother could tell a story.
4.
She's exiting and you wait
half in shadow, improvise
some false act with your phone
so less to look the creep,
loner, skulker. Do not spook her;
she is a life extracted
from your destiny -- another thing
you could not control --
and so too she is the muse who
absconded holding your once
productive merge with this place
and people, and when you
see her emerge you retreat
deeper in your alcove
a moment before setting out
to pursue her, her crowd,
who turn right and you lose them
then catch them, turning right
again at the next street,
right again then entering the bar
next to the restaurant where it all began.
They had walked around the block.
Had she noticed me stalking?
Was she trying to lose me?
5.
Mortified you walk
a dark mile back
to your guest house,
provincial, prosaic.
In the harsh light
you sit on your bed and brood.
Change shirts, change shoes,
retrace the mile to the bar,
excuse yourself through the crowd
but don't see her and walk away
knowing it was the centuries
and the sea that placed you
here in her line of fire on this
beseeching night of Ireland.
Scant sleep,
breakfast at the house --
walk to Leitrim Street,
order a beer and watch
two strippers strip,
one Irish, one Polish, familiar,
yesterday she cleaned your room.
The Polish girl quits the stage
and this is how it ends.
With these Irish strangers
you share one thing:
the flowing hope.
- J. O'Brien
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| A street in Ireland, 2007. |
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