The Other Side
Not far from Croagh Patrick and Mountain of the Eagle
where the patron saint fasted 40 days
praying for the salvation of the Irish people,
in a country you rarely called “home,”
for you attached little affection
and none of that shanty inflection
so many Greenhorns favored —“On the other side,”
in l900, the year Oscar Wilde died, you were born;
but being no great lover of books, not even the Bible,
which the Pope forbade the faithful to read,
you wouldn’t care about Wilde any more than for parsing
the gospels direct. That would have been rough going
for you, Mary, with your two years of school, yes, just
two years of school, then it was off to the lace factory,
which you called “the lace school.” No, “Oscar Wilde”
would not ring a bell, though queens made you giggle;
and didn’t matter to you any less or more than
history or science: them “silly things … for important people
best t’ be bothering with.” The Marquess of Queensbury,
creator of the rules of pugilism imprisoned Irish fairy, Wilde,
across the sea, as in “the States” the Labor Party was coalescing
powerfully, Tammany Hall was the Irish king of your
New York circa that 1900th year of Our Lord,
and you were born. Once you crossed and became
American, a quarter of a decade later, you eschewed political
concerns. A suffragette’s nightmare, you were —
First Tuesday, each November, Mike would rattle
the marital bed, rousing you early, “Himself” propelled by civic
fervor such as only the freshly naturalized possess, he’d lead you
off to the Public School to wait in line to vote Democrat as did he,
to which obedience widowhood at 50 put an end. At the parish
Golden Age Club, later on, local ‘pols’ vied for your vote.
I too, tried electioneering in a hope to sway you, but
politics held as much interest for you as physics or greed.
Hell, born dirt poor 50 years after “The Hunger,” you hadn’t a thing
against Brits. And so hard were you, Mary,
of hearing, that by the time the Roman Church
had done away with the Latin, you couldn’t even hear it
when the priests told the faithful how to vote
from the pulpit. You missed the whole
bloody homily for years! Had you heard, you would have heeded
Father, for any priest was better than no priest, and
a crooked one was as good as any
for a “special intention”; so long
as you put your envelope in the Sunday basket on a stick.
Any priest, even a queer priest or a drunken one, could well put in
a good word with Our Lord. Friedrich Nietzsche
died on the continent the week you were born near Lough Mask and
Knock, where the Blessed Virgin magically appeared, not far
from Cong, and Fir Bolg where a race of small dark pagans
mated with the fairer tribe Tuatha de Denaan, in a wood
frequented by fairies. Wilde? Nietzsche? Neither would
interest you, for philosophers were good
for about as much as poets, or atheists or queers.
And though you were crazy about God, your strong
overriding preference was for his mother.
You never learned to speak to either of them direct,
but mastered the speed-rosary decades faster than the godspeed
of light! But unlike so many American Irish, you
never let the Holy Roman Church succeed in making you
mean. In the l900th year of Our Lord, prospectors were flocking
to the Klondike, and laborers were breaking
ground on the streets of New York where Paddy “sandhogs’
dug out those subway tunnels wherein your mate would spend
a third of his life in the dark as a man with a steady job.
He was born in the city, a lad from Limerick, but you,
you were born where the Armada first touched land;
where Christ’s Spaniards and pirates armed with ferocious
darkness paused to plunder and sully the chill,
pallid grey-eyed Colleens, leaving their white
seed and indelible pitch behind, like tattoos borne in blood —
A blackness which descended down to me,
for which I thank you.
