Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

gave her an old edition of a book by Kate O’Brien. Inside was a motif of swans.
    The following afternoon on a boat on San Francisco Bay she asked me about death, mortality. She’d joined a religious group.
    We hitchhiked north together, staying in a motel in Mendocino. I’d been working with a street-theatre group in Dublin.
    She wore a honeycombed swimsuit. The whales were going south, a passegiata on the horizon.
    There was a great palm tree on the beach, maybe the last one north. The distant whales and the morning ultramarine of the Pacific were framed by rocks on either side of the beach as if it was a theatre scene.
    She returned to Dublin the following May. The last time I made love to her easily there was an image of Mexican forests in my mind. At a party in Dublin, in front of everyone, a girl accused me of impotence and after that I couldn’t make love to Rena anymore. Rena returned to California.
    Years later in southern California a boy in a lumber jacket with mailbox pockets would explain the nature of schizophrenia to me—people say things or do things that have no connection with their emotions, with what they feel.
    In the summer in southern Egypt, near where some of the Gnostic Gospels were found, Coptic priests in flowing black robes among the little white houses, iron Coptic crosses nearby in the desert, I swam in the Nile, despite the fact that I was warned that there were insects in it that could get into your blood. The Nile was an earthenware-jar cerulean.
    I was feeling dead after the attack in Dublin. I walked out into the night in southern Egypt. There were great palm trees against the stars and distantly a man on a camel moved in the desert. In the desert night there were strange sounds, almost songs, half-chants by male voices. There was nothing to distinguish the scene from two thousand years ago. That night I decided to live.
    Next morning I went for a swim in the Nile again. There were a few little boys paddling in nappy-like garments. No other swimmers.
    On the way back north I visited an Irish poet on a Greek island whose address I’d been given in Dublin. On his hall stand was a Spanish hat.
    There were dances on the island in a dance venue that was covered but with open sides. Young men in glove-fitting jeans and girls in white party dresses stood around. The instruments were shot gold and the band played the summoning mariache music of a village afternoon gala. Priests drank coffee by tables that were covered chequered red and white.
    Sophisticated Americans, in bush shirts belted below the waist or cheesecloth peasant dresses, came to dinner one night and everyone dined on the patio. The Americans showed little interest in me.
    When they were gone the poet said: ‘Tomorrow you’ll be gone and nothing I say will make any difference.’
    On the wall there was a signed black-and-white photograph of Anna Akhmatova. He’d met her in Taormina in 1964 when she’d been awarded the Taormina Prize.
    Before I left he gave me a book of her poems. I saw dolphins in the Aegean on my way back to the mainland.
    In a café in Belgrade there was a bunch of marigolds beside a bottle of white wine in half-wicker.
    Rena’s voice returned with some information the old nun had given her.
    ‘Emile Gravelet, “Blondin”, stood upon his head, wheeled a man in a barrow blindfold and cooked an omelette on a stove on a tightrope across the Niagara Falls.’
    A raven had lived near the convent and once stole one of the nuns’ habits for its nest.
    Did I know what ravens’ eggs looked like, Rena asked me on a boat in San Francisco Bay. Remarkably small for the size of the bird, pale blue or pale green, dark-brown spots and ashy markings, but sometimes just pale blue.
    It’s like painting a bunch of marigolds, I thought, years later in southern California, to keep the light, to make something. It’s to accept the gravity of the marigolds; marigolds on the station platform of a small town in County Galway; a bunch of marigolds on a shelf in a café in Belgrade on a Fall morning.
    There are frontiers beyond which a person can’t go, frontiers of shatterment. My friend vanished into a village of condominiums and caravans in northern California. Often in the British Library in London, placed in a book, I’d come across a card for the religious group she’d joined, an emblem of laminated pink rosebuds on what could have been the silver of an old man’s hair.

Sweet Marjoram

    Lowden, in black,