Thomas Murphy Read Online Free PDF Page B

not done are almost always the easy things, requiring the least amount of effort. Life defined by the loss of casual opportunities. Small beer. Why did I not write Snodgrass? To thank him. To gush. To tell him, if only some day, one day, even if by dumb luck, I could write a line like “my lady’s brushing in sunlight,” well I’d die happy. We had a friendship in the offing. I offed it. I was stunned. Was that it? I was scared. Was that it? I was a cocky bastard, thinking, of course helikes my work. Why shouldn’t he? We’re equals, Snodgrass and I. Two peas in a poem. Was that it? Why did I not write Snodgrass?
    TO WALK THROUGH the landscape of a life. Odd, the scenes and moments that elbow their way to positions of prominence. The dear, quiet morning in the field with my ma, when she was naming a flower. The student at Marymount, the ecology zealot. Such a mouth on her, but oh, could she write. A broom leaning in the corner of the cottage. A saw’s wheezing through a plank of pine. A chastised dog. Cait’s freckled thighs. The blunt smell of dung and oil lamps. Soggy biscuits on a yellow plate. The time in Long Island Sound when Oona learns to swim. You go, girl. A sky slumps, defeated. Trout in flight. The wing of a silver seaplane, tipping toward the horizon. Ella on the radio. “Come Rain or Come Shine.” So perfect was her pitch, the members of the band tuned their instruments to her voice. A plough making a circle as it passes over a field. A cloud of lambs. The poise of an egret. The bent teeth of a harrow. The brainstorm. The fury. The pudgy school friend of Máire who asked what a poet does, and when I told him, he laughed. Ubi sunt, ubi sunt. The rocks of Inishmaan. The pigs of Inishmaan. The mud. The mud of Inishmaan, thick, dark, descending in layers to the center of the Earth. A hearse drawn by a farm horse, the woodpainted red and black. Oona answers the priest, I do—mostly. Greenberg hoists us in a chair. An aged woman at an outdoor reading smiles and nods at every right word, the grass trembling at her feet. Her eyes, bright gray. Snodgrass. Where did the time go?
    OVER THE ROCK FIELDS I climbed to Synge’s Chair—that formation of rocks shaped like a caveman’s throne, where J. M. Synge is said to have brooded his plays and essays into being. Synge’s Chair. Have I told you about this? That great granite head of his, and the iron mustache. I would trudge to Synge’s Chair, yearn toward the Atlantic, remain till nightfall, and mark the red declension of the sun. Then I’d return home and my da would read to me in my bed. My unshaven, baritone da of the red creased neck and the whiskey breath. He would prop his one existing leg on the low stool in front of the fire, and read me Padraic Colum and James Stephens, and sometimes even Kavanagh, when da was in his cups.
    His favorite was Yeats. He’d read me the early poems, easier for a boy to understand, such as “At Galway Races,” “These Are the Clouds,” and “Brown Penny.” He loved “Brown Penny”—a young man’s poem, he said—and he recited it from memory. Lusty, wistful, plain sad sometimes, as he’d glance at his left leg, then at the space where his right leg used to be. He’d lost that one in a thresher,when he was eighteen. He never complained, never a word, just that glance at the absent leg. More than the books, that taught me how to write a poem.
    They really aren’t difficult, my poems, no matter what the good Dr. Spector says. Greenberg got ’em readily enough. Oh, I’ll toss in a wild word from time to time, to keep the reader on his toes, the way Heaney does, and Paul Muldoon. But neither of those great fellas is hard to understand, and I’m not either. Most of the poets of my race are not hard to understand. We just play hard to get.
    Basically, we’re piano bar players, singing our guts out and