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' Life passes through places.' –P.J. Duffy, Landscapes of South Ulster Patrick Farrell, of Lackagh, who was able to mow one acre and one rood Irish in a day. Tom Gallagher, Cornamucklagh, could walk 50 Irish miles in one day. Patrick Mulligan, Cremartin, was a great oarsman. Tommy Atkinson, Lismagunshin, was very good at highjumping—he could jump six feet high. John Duffy, Corley, was able to dig half an Irish acre in one day. Edward Monaghan, Annagh, who could stand on his head on a pint tumbler or on the rigging of a house. –1938 folklore survey to record the local people who occupied the South Ulster parish landscape. * * * Kathleen McKenna, Annagola, who was able to wash a week’s sheets, shirts and swaddling, bake bread and clean the house all of a Monday. Birdy McMahon, of Faulkland, walked to Monaghan for a sack of flour two days before her eighth child was born. Cepta Duffy, Glennan, very good at sewing—embroidered a set of vestments in five days. Mary McCabe, of Derrynashallog, who cared for her husband’s mother in dotage, fed ten children, the youngest still at the breast during hay-making. Mary Conlon, Tullyree, who wrote poems at night. Assumpta Meehan, Tonygarvey, saw many visions and was committed to the asylum. Martha McGinn, of Emy, who swam Cornamunden Lough in one hour and a quarter. Marita McHugh, Foxhole, whose sponge cakes won First Prize at Cloncaw Show. Miss Harper, Corley, female problems rarely ceased, pleasant in ill-health. Patricia Curley, Corlatt, whose joints ached and swelled though she was young, who bore three children. Dora Heuston, Strananny, died in childbirth, aged 14 years, last words ‘Mammy, O Mammy!’ Rosie McCrudden, Aghabog noted for clean boots, winter or summer, often beaten by her father. Maggie Traynor, Donagh, got no breakfasts, fed by the nuns, batch loaf with jam, the best speller in the school. Phyllis McCrudden, Knockaphubble, who buried two husbands, reared five children, and farmed her own land. Ann Moffett, of Enagh, who taught people to read and did not charge.

Out along the last curve in the brick walk the grass has begun to green, with the freezing cold and coming snow its certain fate. The cranes make the same mistake, fields of red capped heads attest their arrival just before the worst blizzard of winter makes it impossible to tell the field from the river. And we, too, have known these mortal mishaps, miscalculated our time, found ourselves out of step, arriving too early, staying on too late, misjudging the nearness, the vengeance of the storm. The cranes, the grass, they tell us: this can go on for millions of years.

But it is not always quiet here. Things go on while we sleep the sleep of soldiers. Ancient branches crack and splinter into dust. Large wings snap open in spring like carpets splayed out over the railing. Granite splits apart at the seams and great animals cleave roads through woods. Daily, in the density, there is life on the edge of the knife that cuts the world into hemispheres of sense and death. Trees are born and die, bones turn to humus, glaciers to meadowland. It is time to turn yourself loose, like new leaves, like big lakes on which swim enormous birds at a distance deeper in breadth than the water's depth. Their shadows pull you to the shore. Their size fills your lungs with sky. It is time to heave aside the boulders and the dams, to come back out like a bear after the thaw, to be ready for the forest, for the forage, for the full and waning moons. You will get soaked in wet grass, feel the insects pierce your skin. You will learn to balance between gravity and light. There will be hot and sticky nights, sharp songs at dawn, long and bright ineffable days. This is your chance to crash your way through underbrush unlocking like so many doors.

She does this thing. Our seventeen- year-old dog. Our mostly deaf dog. Our mostly dead dog, statistically speaking. When I crouch. When I put my mouth to her ear and shout her name. She walks away. Walks toward the nothing of speech. She even trots down the drive, ears up, as if my voice is coming home. It’s like watching a child believe in Christmas, right before you burn the tree down. Every time I do it, I think, this time she’ll turn to me. This time she’ll put voice to face. This time, I’ll be absolved of decay. Which is like being a child who believes in Christmas as the tree burns, as the drapes catch, as Santa lights a smoke with his blowtorch and asks, want one?

We say lightning has no wings when it slides down our houses We say loss is just a condition we acquire to bury our pity further We say the bleeding hands on the table filled with red wine imported products and passports are just reminders of who we have become We have no titles no birthright no groves or Shakespeare to return to We apologize for the fear growing out of our ribs Apologize for the numbers still etched on our tongues

And accustomed ungentle hands of two blue-uniformed attendants wrap the patient in suffering’s white bed gown sewn with bright invisible emblems of virtues, or pinned with them, as with fraternity pins, or mosaic pins, meaning travel. Has he always only just arrived? Really suffering, within and without his head burn hot wires of pain: “I cannot bear this”: and does, and does the time and place outwardly expound what is within? To be well, to wear new clothes, to decimate his wage for a necktie, a scarf or gloves, love “your magic spell” scabbed his fevered lips, lay no cold cloths, though to be him bent on him eyes of those called to selflessness, lonely for more selfish days.

Can’t hear things well if they are things whispering. Nothing gentle to hand on back of hand. A horsehair bow across gut string. A heart is a physical object singing in the chest. Chamber doors oxygenating blood rushing through. Salmon through river climb. When one writes of light as a painted smile across face. You call bullshit to the interpretation. A post re-posted significant meme image locked to words. Speak of Soul? Sounds like a grifter’s hustle. Don’t do it. Anyways, you try to place yourself into the nature poetry experience. In your nature placement, you’re constantly thinking of how you don’t like to shit outdoors. You like a toilet throne and a stall and toilet tissue. Your mind ruins beautiful poetry expressions by expressions before a flush. Yes, if you see a nature painting you ponder a spot to express self. Think of hole digging and burial afterward. A courtesy thing. Some mass crushing flowers. Or smeared across a granite slope. Is not a waterfall one constant flush? You mean, if you were to see this world through black-light vision, knowing everything covered in shit , this planet would be a beautiful glow.

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts, We died in your valleys and died on your plains. We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes, Both sides of the river, we died just the same. "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportees)," Woody Guthrie I after the immigration raid Beneath one apple tree the fruit lies flung like the beads from a rosary with a broken string. Another tree stands amused over the strangeness of a shoe that pretends to be an apple in its redness, though it'll never be an apple with that lace stem and a pit where a core should be. The tree at the end of the row will weep over the pillage all week. Around its trunk, debris: straw hats, handkerchief, a basket going hungry for what's out of reach. Somewhere in the orchard a screech goes weaker by the hour. A radio without paws, it cannot claw its chords to end its suffering. But silence comes, eventually, and the apple trees will rest, gathering the shadows to their roots as the flame inside each apple falls asleep. All the while, finches perch among the branches—patient vultures waiting for the fruit to rot. For a wasp, intoxicated by the sugars, this is the perfect place to nest. The colony will thrive inside decay: the apples softening until their wrinkled skins begin to sink, the seeds poking through like teeth. The trees will sway without the wind because the ground will boil with larvae. A bird will feast until it chokes and ants will march into the belly through the beak. II after the ride by bus A strand of hair pretends to be a crack and sticks to glass. A piece of thread sits on a seat, pretends to be a tear. The bus makes believe no one cried into their hands and smeared that grief onto its walls. The walls will keep the fingerprints a secret until the sheen of oils glows by moon. Rows of ghosts come forth to sing. Until that keening rocks the bus to rest, the fumes intoxicate the solitary button—single witness to the shuffling of feet and a final act of fury: the yanking of a wetback's shirt. The button popped right off the flannel, marched in the procession and then scurried to the side. The lesson: if wounded, stay behind to die. The bus breathes out the shapes turned silhouettes turned scent of salt and sweat. The steering wheel unspools, every window shaking loose the wetness of its glare. And now a riddle squats over the parking lot: What creature stands its ground after evisceration? Roadkill. Clouds close in to consume the afterbirth. III after the detention in the county jail A mausoleum also keeps these gems: precipitation that hardens into diamonds on the cobweb stems, streams of urine that shimmer like streaks of gold. Lights coax out the coat of polish on the floor and what's solid softens into water stripped of ripples. Stilled and empty, a river that has shoved its pebbles down its throat. The cell holds out three drops of blood and will barter them for company, hungry for the smell of men again. Janitor, border guard or detainee, it's all the same musk of armpit, garlic breath, oils that bubble up from crack to tailbone, scent of semen from the foreskin, fungus from the toes. Without takers, the keyhole constricts in the cold. IV after the deportation plane falls from the sky A red-tailed hawk breaks through the smoke and doesn't drop the way the bodies did when the plane began to dive and spat pieces of its cargo out the door. No grace, the twitching of such a great machine. No beauty to its blackening inside the pristine canvas of majestic blue—a streak of rage made by a torch and not a paintbrush. The hawk lands on the canyon and snaps its neck in quick response to the vulgar cracking on the boulders, to the shrill of metal puncturing the canyon, to the burst of flames that traps a nest of mice within the lair turned furnace, burning shriek, and hair. Stunned host of sparrows scatters. Fume of feathers, pollution in the air. Poison in the lungs of all that breathes. A darkness rises. The blue absorbs it the way it dissipates a swarm after the crisis of a shattered hive. Heaven shows its mercy also, swallowing the groan that spilled out of the hill. No signs of tragedy by dusk except a star splayed over rock, the reek of fumes—a disemboweled god. V after the clean-up along Los Gatos Canyon What strange flowers grow in the shadow. Without petals and with crooked twigs for stems. The butterflies that pollinated them were bits of carbon glowing at the edge. The solitary lone wolf spider doesn't dare to bite the scorched caul on the canyon. It packs its fangs for brighter lands. The footprints drawn in black do not match the footprints in the orchard though they also bear the weight of the unwanted. The chain gang called upon to gather the debris sang the Prison Blues all afternoon: Inmate, deportee, in your last attempt to flee every bone splits into three. VI after the communal burial Twenty-eight equals one deportation bus equals one cell in the detention center, one plane-load of deportees, one plunge into the canyon, one body in the coffin although one was a woman—sister not alone anymore among the chaperone of angels with wings of stone. Manuel Merino, Julio Barrón, Severo, Elías, Manuel Calderón, Francisco, Santiago, Jaime, Martín, Lupe, Guadalupe, Tomás, Juan Ruiz, Alberto, Ramón, Apolonio, Ramón, Luis, Román, Luis, Salvador, Ignacio Navarro, Jesús, Bernabé, Rosalío Portillo, María, y José. Y un Deportado No Identificado. No papers necessary to cross the cemetery. The sun floods the paths between tombs and everything pushes out into light. No shame to be a cherub without a nose. The wreath will not hide its decay. Cement displays its injuries with no regrets. This is the place to forget about labor and hardship and pain. No house left to build, no kitchen to clean, no chair on a porch, no children to feed. No longing left except a wish that will never come true: Paint us back into the blank sky's blue. Don't forget us like we've forgotten all of you.

for John Fogleman There are some things we just don’t talk about— Not even in the morning, when we’re waking, When your calloused fingers tentatively walk The slope of my waist: How love’s a rust-worn boat, Abandoned at the dock—and who could doubt Waves lick their teeth, eyeing its hull? We’re taking Our wreckage as a promise, so we don’t talk. We wet the tired oars, tide drawing us out. We understand there’s nothing to be said. Both of us know the dangers of this sea, Warned by the tide-worn driftwood of our pasts—. But we’ve already strayed from the harbor. We thread A slow wake though the water—then silently, We start to row, and will for as long as this lasts.

“The wind doth blow today, my love, And a few small drops of rain; I never had but one true-love, In cold grave she was lain. “I’ll do as much for my true-love As any young man may; I’ll sit and mourn all at her grave For a twelvemonth and a day.” The twelvemonth and a day being up, The dead began to speak: “Oh who sits weeping on my grave, And will not let me sleep?” “’T is I, my love, sits on your grave, And will not let you sleep; For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips, And that is all I seek.” “You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips, But my breath smells earthy strong; If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips, Your time will not be long. “’T is down in yonder garden green, Love, where we used to walk, The finest flower that e’re was seen Is withered to a stalk. “The stalk is withered dry, my love, So will our hearts decay; So make yourself content, my love, Till God calls you away.”