Memorial Day, Eagle Rock Boulevard

When I think of L.A. I think of things that are no longer there.

John Fante’s Bunker Hill boarding house,

The crumpled slips between the wooden seats at Santa Anita racetrack,

Where Bukowski cursed his way through another weekday afternoon.

The marble fireplace where Scott Fitzgerald stood,

In the rented Hollywood home where he tried to recharge his life – and where he lost it.

That strange bright emptiness – a great unease – that Joan Didion lived in and wrote about.

The last is still there, high above Eagle Rock Boulevard, where I walk, remembering.

All of these people wrote, and lived and drank and fought, against it. And for what?

The dust, the heat, the dry air, the lure and the promise and the tiredness, are too great to overcome.

Not that we should stop trying.

—–

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Raymond Carver

I’ve just told my wife
That we need to visit Clatskanie, Oregon, your birthplace.
And I often think to myself “I should take a trip to Port Angeles
And see the great, gray light on the Pacific and visit his grave site”.

But then I think “What’s the point?”
Why bother with places, the faint traces of memory on streets and buildings, with plaques on walls?
All we have is the words, you wrote,
And they better be the right ones.
_____

Immigrant songs – Heaney, Joyce and Ronnie Drew

James Joyce, Zurich, 1915.

As an Irishman, it’s rare to find a fresh take on emigration. The culture of leave-taking and return, post-Christmas news reports from the departure gates at Dublin Airport, regularly thinking eight hours ahead, finding yourself in an Irish bar at 6 a.m. watching a sports game “from home” – most of these are familiar to the Irish emigrant.

Along with the songs and stories of course – from John Healy’s “The Grass Arena”, to Ronnie Drew’s recording of “McAlpine’s Fusiliers“, to the granddaddy of them all, James Joyce’s “Ulysses’, written in three continental cities but a chronicle of only one.

Historically the message has usually, ultimately, been one of exile – whether by force or choice. This ‘push’ story has often obscured the ‘pull’ narrative, the story of the return to Ireland: there are not as many songs about the prodigal Irishmen and women who came back.

This “pull” is the subject of a short, early poem of Seamus Heaney’s. “Gravities” appeared in Heaney’s first collection, “Death of a Naturalist”. It’s a poem that examines the “strict and invisible” force that pulls people back, to relationships and to countries.

Reading it also reminds me that even some of Ireland’s most famous exiles, Joyce and the monk Colmcille, for all their achievements in other countries, never escaped the pull of the home. (Even if, in Joyce’s case, they would never return.)

“Gravities” 

High-riding kites appear to range quite freely

Though reined by strings, strict and invisible.

The pigeon that deserts you suddenly

Is heading home, instinctively faithful.

 

Lovers with barrages of hot insult

Often cut off their nose to spite their face,

Endure a hopeless day, declare their guilt,

Re-enter the native port of their embrace.

 

Blinding in Paris, for his party-piece

Joyce named the shops along O’Connell Street

And on Iona Colmcille sought ease

by wearing Irish mould next to his feet.

_____

Death mask in North Great George’s Street

Death mask.

It’s himself.

In a black box, glass-faced, placed in a room on the top floor of a Georgian house.

Looking peaceful.

Little sign of the ulcer that killed him, or the stress of the years unpublished in exile,

Or the pain of the eye operations.

It’s not the original death mask – instead the product of revisions and iterations.

But it’s his parting glance to the world.

Smaller than his stature suggests, and gentler,

James Joyce sleeps in a quiet room, four storeys up, between Eccles Street and Nighttown.

Oddly, he looks at home.

_____

Rest stop

We arrived the night after a hurricane’s last winds

Had whipped their way over South Carolina.

The beach and the trees were still and empty – the summer washed away,

A clean slate for Autumn.

We had driven from California, three weeks across the country,

And this driftwood beach and empty tourist town was ‘it’, the moment we reached the other coast.

We had arrived.

In 24 hours we would move on. For now, all was clear and endless.

The years of college were over, ahead lay possibility, calm water, storms, inconceivable events,

We ate by a beach campfire, and slept heavily that night, unburdened.

_____

Highway 26

Pic: EncMstr

Every morning: gray and speed and signal lights and merging.

Hundreds of cars entering the tunnel every minute.

Thousands of stories, worries, illnesses, joys, and fears –

Speeding through a hillside at 60 miles per hour.

Most of us doing it to earn enough to

Do it all again tomorrow.

_____

 

Gate 67, SFO

SFO, February 2018.

Back to the place where I first set foot, 20 years ago,

And feeling as tired today as I was then, and bearing the weight of the years too.

But it’s always good to be back, even briefly, to a city of ghosts and memories.

These days it’s just for a short time, en route to somewhere else.

But wasn’t that the way it was then too?

San Francisco is always there, though. It’s where it began.

—–

‘My days of allnight parties are over’

Passport photo, 1998

As my 40^th birthday approached this week, I found myself casting about for an insight or a lesson or a fear to impart, as I slipped into my fifth decade.

Nothing pretentious, or too light-hearted, or egotistical, of course. It wasn’t easy.

And then I came across a Roger McGough poem, which – as my days are, thankfully, “rarely unruly” – summed it up better than I could.

 

Not for Me a Youngman’s Death

Not for me a youngman’s death

Not a car crash, whiplash

John Doe, DOA at A&E kind of death.

Not a gun in hand, in a far off land

IED at the roadside death

 

Not a slow-fade, razor blade

bloodbath in the bath, death.

Jump under a train, Kurt Cobain

bullet in the brain, death

 

Not a horse-riding paragliding

mountain climbing fall, death.

Motorcycle into an old stone wall

you know the kind of death, death

 

My nights are rarely unruly. My days

of allnight parties are over, well and truly.

No mistresses no red sports cars

no shady deals no gangland bars

no drugs no fags no rock’n’roll

Time alone has taken its toll

 

Not for me a youngman’s death

Not a domestic brawl, blood in the hall

knife in the chest, death.

Not a drunken binge, dirty syringe

“What a waste of a life” death.

_____

Of reeds and rhymes and religion

Saint Brigid of Kildare

Where I’m from, Spring began today. Where I live, it won’t start until March 20.

In the Celtic calendar, February 1 is known as ‘imbolc’. The midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, it’s seen as the first day of the earth awakening from winter.

In Ireland it was, and is, Saint Brigid’s Day, a celebration of the pagan (later Christianized) St Brigid of Kildare, a patroness of medicine, arts and crafts, cattle and other livestock, and sacred wells.

The sacred bit is important. As a schoolkid in Ireland, we’d make St Brigid’s Crosses from reeds – a plentiful resource in my then-hometown of Athlone, on the banks of Ireland’s longest river. The crosses would be pinned up at home – a religious talisman of sorts, ahead of the spring season.

Today I’m a long way from the River Shannon, or from spring – that won’t happen until late March in Oregon.

But, after the dreary month of January, I’m trying to get in the spring mood. So I’m seeking out seasonal verse.

St Brigid was known as “the goddess who poets adored”, but I’m not aware of Philip Larkin’s thoughts about her. However I do know – and enjoy – his take on spring, which contains the wise call, despite some cynicism, to “begin afresh, afresh, afresh”.

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

_____

7am, January 1

Ainsworth Street, Portland

Walking on New Year’s morning

and what’s changed? The sun still rises,

The pavement is the same damp concrete,

And the 8 bus creeps across Ainsworth, as it always does.

A new year? Well, the dogs go on with their doggy ways,

A car engine starts, the leaves lie in same piles, and Portland wakes

Like Portland always wakes.

Renewal, rebirth, starting anew – I don’t feel much of all that

In this morning half hour.

The clocks have not been reset. Things tick on, good, bad, indifferent.

And what’s wrong with this?

_____