Thomas Murphy (13 page)

Stone-eyed kids ran to greet us at the pier, ragged and scrawny, in pleated skirts and prep school blazers with coats of arms. They wore garlands of green leaves and sang in a language none of us knew. A bier bearing the body of an ancient priest with a thick white beard was wheeled in among them, and hundreds of the citizens lined up to view it. Some identified the man as their father. Others did not. At the appearance of the bier, the children dispersed, and then the bier disappeared. Where the bazaar had stood only moments earlier, there now was a flat grassy plain, with a few scattered pedestals in disrepair, and stone
heads fallen at the bases, as in a defunct outdoor sculpture gallery. Excitement rolled through our decks, first class to steerage, but just as we were about to tie up at the pier, the immense island lurched and flew again, making it impossible for us to reach it. Then the stone-eyed kids returned and tossed us ropes. And at last we were home. Remember?

SELF-MADE EXILES
like
me are a dime a dozen, and that goes for fussy, cock-o'-the-walk Jimmy Joyce as well. Pray silence for the gates, the ones who remain in the fields, swinging open and closed, coming nowhere, going nowhere. Hinged, unhinged. A tip of the cap to those who stay put, the grayed deadwood not fit for kindling. The gates. The gates are Ireland.

SAYS HERE IN
“Why Do Men Love Islands?” that Masafumi Nagasaki, a seventy-six-year-old skinny boyo with a nice even tan (the photo), lives in hermetic solitude and “apparently content” on a rocky island off the Japanese coast. Way to go, Masafumi. Says your island is “inhospitable,” and that you have endured typhoons, as you walk around naked. Glad they have no photo of that, Masafumi. I mean, who knows what you're doing with yourself, you old devil.

As for Murph, he has lived on two islands all his life, both darlin' places. The isle of my birth is an extension of the Burren, the terrain made of limestone pavements with crisscrossing “grikes” or cracks in it. The isolated rocks are called “clints.” As in Clint Eastwood and Zorba the Grike. There was a period of glaciers, as there always is, followed by the Namurian phase, resulting in what geologists call one of the finest examples of a glaciokarst landscape in the world. That is to say, more rocks. And weren't we Inishpeople proud.

Now, Manhattan can also be seen as an island of rocks—vertical and gleaming, to be sure, but basically rocks. Says here in “Why Do Men Love Islands?” that my gender consists of loners like Masafumi, that we tend toward isolation, that we all would like to be Robinson Crusoe, that we swoon for the sea, and that we're antisocial romantics. I say it's the rocks.

LET TWO PAIRS
of rowers start out toward each other from opposite ends of the ocean. Let one pair embark from Inishmaan and the other from Manhattan, and let them sing shanties as they go. Let the ocean be difficult for them, tossing and menacing. Let them think of giving up and turning back. But let them not turn back. Let them row in stippled strokes through the inhospitable sea, and the shouting weather, and the elegiac crashing of
the waves. After a long time, let them reach sight of each other in midocean at last, and let them wave in joy and triumph. When they pull their boats alongside each other, let them weep and embrace. Let them inquire of each other's health, and of their families' health, and of their genealogies and roots. Let them praise each other and teach each other, and offer solace. Let them sing to each other, tell tales to each other, propose commercial enterprises to each other, and the creation of parks and cities, and galleries of art. Let them sleep and dream of the sublime. Finally, let them ask of each other why they undertook this mission in the first place. Let them not know why.

ARE YOU OUT
THERE?
The cry of poets everywhere. Are you out there? Meaning, not merely you at this minute, but you who exist a hundred, a thousand years from now. Are you reading old Murph, Sir Thomas James Murphy, Esq. himself. DEA, PCP, SUV, KFC? Have I done anything worthy of reaching across the plains of the years to you in your dumps or palaces? I see you walking in the stubbled fields, heads down over a book. A book! Still? Is it
The Collected Works of Thomas J. Murphy
you're reading, or, if not all the works, a work or two, a phrase or clause, perhaps a single word quoted in your version of
Bartlett's
. Even a plagiarized idea will do. Or have the secret police banned any mention of my name. Something?

Show me the palms of your hands. Show me on Skype. Nothing. The leathery puckered palms of your two-fingered hands. Nothing. Have you no interest in what went before? I may not be much, but I went before. My head teems with galaxies. Someday, in the year 5014, you too will have gone before, and if you write a poem, you too will ask, Are you out there? Of course, it is possible that at this stage of erosion you know nothing, including your own desires. You may have evolved to eyeless petunias marooned at the farthest edge of Lusitania, where there is only fog and skulls, in a place so desolate, it makes Inishmaan look like Metropolis. Yet, if you do not read me, if you do not read anyone, why kiss?

Rumors of your existence have reached headquarters. Before the mass suicides that ordinarily attend such bulletins, you might send word that someone is reading someone somewhere. Even if you have to make it up. Here I gladly abandon my ego. If nothing of mine survives, so be it. But Wallace Stevens? What of Wallace Stevens? Surely Mr. Death must have tunneled his way out of the camp, enduring the critics and other fecal matter, and found his way to you, bearing a poem or two, a line or two, or a thought. He said that poetry reveals appearances and renovates experience. Something worth preserving in that. No? Health. He said poetry is health. To your health, then.
Sláinte
. Cover your nostrils and your eyes. What is that
howling
? You?

Hard to believe that all our excursions end in ice. If I
have a past, I have a future. My projections are contained in my time capsule. Within me I hold what is to come. I need not see it. Poetry should carry my future, even if the anthologies are airy, and the range of colors is reduced to gray, and there is no light in you. No light. Then read by my light, the light of me, by my flickering hope that by some means of transport, in the pebbles and the terns, shivers news of me and mine. You are my tongue. You are my poem. Are you out there?

Where can it be found again,

An elsewhere world . . .

—Seamus Heaney, in Thomas Murphy's

Book of Dandy Quotations

DO DREAMS COUNT
in the places that keep public records? Where a village stores the titles connected to land and the houses, and the histories of streets, and who lies buried in what plot in the cemetery. Has anyone ever founded such a hall for dreams? The dreams of the villagers. That would be something. Yes? The Hall of Recorded Dreams. Like that vast granite Hall of Justice built on Centre Street in New York in the 1830s, called The Tombs, where, alongside the courts, they kept inmates on Death Row, who walked across a Bridge of Sighs to the
gallows. The Hall of Recorded Dreams would be even bigger than The Tombs, but it would be bright and full of life. And music playing. All the pop tunes that people hear in their minds. And there would be an Annex to the Hall, for Unrecorded Dreams that people kept to themselves, like prayers. What a field trip for schoolchildren, to walk through the catacombs and the stacks, and pluck down their family's dreams, and their friends', and their own. You could read your old man's unrecorded dreams. Here's my da's. Oh, Jeez. They're all about me.

THE HOTEL ROOM
is cramped, with dark green walls. It smells of tobacco and creosote. The picture of Don Quixote over the brass bed is not the usual, in that the Don is wearing gray running shorts and a blue beret instead of the knight getup, and is holding a Bic pen instead of a lance. The fireplace requires a shilling for the heat. Finding only pesos in my bathrobe pocket, I remain cold. Somewhere Dean Martin is singing “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” so clearly, I wonder if he is in the room with me. Outside on the esplanade, a smiling couple seated at a round table with a red-checkered tablecloth are toasting each other with steins of coffee. He noodles her hair. They may be posing for an ad. At an adjacent table, a wolf and a goatherd are locked in conversation about the Ebola virus. The wolf slouches. The skull of the goatherd
bulges like a purple lung. They speak in the language of the forests. A beggar approaches the table of the smiling couple, carrying a rolled-up canvas that he unfurls like the phases of the moon to reveal
Las Meninas,
the original Velázquez painting. He wears the hard shoes of an Irish dancer and a tunic of gold lamé. The couple ignores the masterpiece, and the beggar sighs, moves on, and vanishes on the road into a calamity of geese. In my hotel room sits an old DuMont TV with a circular frame for the tiny screen. W. D. Snodgrass is on the set of the
Tonight Show,
behind a heavy carved-wood desk. He is editing a manuscript. Startled, he looks up, and says, Murph? Why didn't you write?

Murph? William says. Murph? Murph? I open my eyes to find my little William beside me on the bench in the park playground, tugging at my sleeve. Murph? Were you sleeping? Christ, I mutter, scared to death. I clutch him to me.

SO I CLUTCHED
HER
to me. But she broke my hold, and the cloak of my trance was lifted from my shoulders and I lay on the field, eyes open to the stars in shambles. Until that time, I lived in my dream state, riding the red mare bareback in midriver, the horse snorting and shaking the water off her, splashing, and stretching her great neck. When we came to the hospital, she bolted and threw me.
I inquired after Cait. Her room was a pandemonium of tubes and sponges. It smelled of resolution. Cait herself was a pandemonium of tubes and sponges, invisible under the riot, which made it difficult to hold a conversation. So I held her instead, the tubes and sponges and the girl, now small as a name, saying this and saying that. How's life? I asked her. Life? she said. Why are you weeping, Murph? Ya big sissy. Life could not be better. Life's the best. Then she slept. And after a year or two, wouldn't you know it, she flew out the hospital window in the company of a white crow, soaring high, so very high, all that was left of her was a pinpoint of light, like a point of emphasis, deep in the firmament. Since there was nothing more for me to do after that, I rested in the bed where Cait's body had been, lay down in the depression her body had made. And I tried to fill it. But, of course, I could not.

I SAW GREENBERG
weep only once. Not weep, exactly. Tear up. Have I told you about this? We were lounging in the backyard of the frame house in Sunset Park we lived in before he found Barry for himself and Oona for me. We were twenty-eight, twenty-nine, with little to do during the week but work (he at law, I at teaching Catholic girls in short plaid skirts) and tell each other stories on the weekends. I was exotic to him for Inishmaan. He was exotic to me for everything—Harvard, Yale, lacrosse, the
navy. One delicious summer evening, as we stretched out in our cheap chaises, he grew quiet at something I had said that reminded him of an incident with a kid named Forrest. It was at Groton, and Forrest, a rich thug from Greenwich, began to taunt Greenberg, first for being Jewish, then for being gay. He blustered into my room, and loomed over me, Greenberg said. I sat at my desk, trying not to acknowledge him, but Forrest persisted. Hey Jewboy. Hey fag. I was bigger and stronger than he was, and I knew how to box, so I kept my cool for as long as I could. Then I told him to leave the room. He tipped my chair so that I fell to the floor on my back. Without thinking, I leapt to my feet and punched him hard in the face, four or five times in rapid succession. I heard his nose break. Then I hit him in the eyes, and I heard one of the sockets crack, too. It was all over in a matter of seconds, and he stumbled from my room, screaming and wailing. We both were just fifteen. No one ever blamed me. Not the headmaster. Not even Forrest's parents, who were too familiar with their son's foul temperament. But when Forrest was out of my room, I closed the door and wept. Why? I asked him. He had turned me into a savage, Murph, he said. Just like
him.

ONE THING
we
never did. We never took revenge on the bastards. When we'd won our freedom, and could have
raped their women, burned their fields, hobbled their horses, and taken apart their manses stone by stone, we did not. Know why? Because Irishmen are angels? Hardly. It was because we didn't want to create a national memory of which we'd live to be ashamed. Purely a practical measure. 'Twas that simple.

I don't know that people appreciate how much of so-called civic virtue consists of purely practical measures. We had an ancient system of land distribution on Inishmaan that sounds as if it was the result of high-minded democratic thinking. It was called rundale, and, as far as I know, it's still practiced on the island. Every landowner had three fields, enclosed by rock walls. One field was good, tillable land, one was so-so, and one was good for nothing. The distribution was the same for everyone, so that no one ever felt too rich or too poor. Now you might say that such a system presaged socialism or communism or something aggressive like that. But no one ever heard of those things on Inishmaan. And neither was rundale worked out to effect justice and fair play on the island. It was just common sense. With a system like that in place, no one would ever be knocked off for his land. And no one was.

Know why I work with the homeless? Because I feel sorry for them? Because I think everyone should do things like that? Because I believe that the homeless deserve all the kindness we can give them? Yes, on all counts. Gotcha.