Thomas Murphy Read Online Free PDF

graduation from Brown, the mortarboard deliberately cockeyed on her head. Beside that, her holding just-born William.
    Before that, she is in business school at NYU, and shecomes over late at night, and sits beside me on the couch. Oona is long asleep, so it’s just us two. We listen to the old songs, the standards, on the radio. Mr. Jameson joins us. My drinking buddy always has taken to whiskey, a genetic inheritance, and can drink her old man under the table, though she rarely tries. We sit and chat and sing in thirds harmonies—“If you’re ever in a jam, here I am.” Sometimes I’m writing, and sometimes she has homework. She looks across at me every so often, for old times’ sake. Mon semblable. Mon scold .
    WHEN SAINT JOHN JAMESON established the Bow Street Distillery in Dublin, in 1780, what tests did he devise for the whiskey to see if it was good? I wonder. Body? Color? Did he work out the balance between malted and unmalted barley, and dry the liquid in a kiln to achieve just enough sweetness on the tongue and burn on the throat? Or did he use a different sort of test entirely, one that led to one million gallons of Jameson produced every year? Did he say to himself, if this makes grief go away, it’s a keeper?
    ONE FOR THE ROADS? All Inishmaan roads are divided in three parts: the stone walls on either side, the two tracks for carts and cars, and the island of tall grass and flowering weeds between the tracks. Of these three, only one isconnected with motion or travel. The island and the walls represent the stationary. In every road, therefore, lies the dual possibilities of Ireland. Stay or go. But the road remains the same, giving of nothing, no hint as to which way of life it tends or recommends. Like certain poems.
    You can thus read into each road a lesson in freedom of choice. I made no such reading. I knew I would go eventually, and I saw the roads only as statements of clean clarity, nouns, beautiful for what they were, and not for the ways they might relate to me. The same was true of the trees on Inishmaan and the gaggles of wildflowers and the houses and the pubs and the pigs in their folklore. Each life unto itself in this stupefying world.
    INTO THE SAME NIGHT I walk as I did as a child, welcoming the same defeats, desires, usurpations. This irrevocable pilgrimage. As one says after a good conversation with a friend, where did the time go? Emerging from At Swim-Two-Birds, I battle a snootful. Grim kids swagger on Eighty-seventh and Columbus. A wintry creature, his keen animal’s face shining in the hoarfrost, takes command of the curb. I know him from the church shelter where I teach a poetry workshop to my homeless beauties once a month. Murph! he cries. Arthur! I cry. He is huge, made of heavy curves and rounded edges. Arthur the Bear! Nobody knows if he’s black or white, his skinis so caked with soot. Murph the Bard! He’s in a good mood tonight. You can tell when he’s not. Dr. Reynolds, the minister at the shelter, the only clergyman I’ve ever known with a sense of humor, calls Arthur a bi-polar bear. Murph! Arthur and I greet each other as if at sea.
    All is in decline. Empires, literacy, gaudy birds. I follow a trail of rotting flowers from the Koreans’ convenience store to a snowy ravine where ice has seized the upper boughs. My teeth clench. One of these days I’m going to learn to hold my liquor. One of these days I’m going to learn to hold my recriminations. S’long, Murph! See you, Arthur! Show me the way to go home.
    Why did I not write Snodgrass? It was 1975, and he’d liked a poem of mine in the Antioch Review. I cannot recall why I did not write him back. Snodgrass. Poet of “Heart’s Needle” and “April Inventory.” Poet of quiet dread and silver maples. I have come to a stage of recriminations when one wonders not why one did certain things in a life, but rather why not. And all the things