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Give me back my father walking the halls of Wertheimer Box and Paper Company with sawdust clinging to his shoes. Give me back his tape measure and his keys, his drafting pencil and his order forms; give me his daydreams on lined paper. I don't understand this uncontainable grief. Whatever you had that never fit, whatever else you needed, believe me, my father, who wanted your business, would squat down at your side and sketch you a container for it.

How struck I was by that face, years ago, in the church mural: Eve, being led by Christ through the broken gates of Hell. She’s been nominated for the position of Featured Saint on the Icon of Belief, up against the dark horse candidate— me: fever-ridden and delirious, a child in Vellore, unfolding the packet around my neck that I was ordered not to open. Inside, a folk cure, painted delicately in saffron. Letters that I could not read. Why I feel qualified for the position based on letters I could not read amounts to this: Neither you nor I can pronounce the difference between the broken gates and the forbidden letters. So what reason do we need to believe in icons or saints? How might we otherwise remember— without an image to fasten in that lonely place— the rock on which a Prophet flung himself into fever? Without an icon or church, spell “gates of Hell.” Spell “those years ago unfolding.” Recite to me please all the letters you are not able to read. Spell “fling yourself skyward.” Spell “fever.”

(from Macbeth , spoken by Macbeth) Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? I see thee yet, in form as palpable As this which now I draw. Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going; And such an instrument I was to use. Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses, Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still, And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, Which was not so before. There's no such thing: It is the bloody business which informs Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one halfworld Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder, Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf, Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace. With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth, Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear Thy very stones prate of my whereabout, And take the present horror from the time, Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives: Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives. [a bell rings] I go, and it is done; the bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

Once I loved a spider When I was born a fly, A velvet-footed spider With a gown of rainbow-dye. She ate my wings and gloated. She bound me with a hair. She drove me to her parlor Above her winding stair. To educate young spiders She took me all apart. My ghost came back to haunt her. I saw her eat my heart.

I Thy soul shall find itself alone ’Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone— Not one, of all the crowd, to pry Into thine hour of secrecy. II Be silent in that solitude, Which is not loneliness—for then The spirits of the dead who stood In life before thee are again In death around thee—and their will Shall overshadow thee: be still. III The night, tho’ clear, shall frown— And the stars shall look not down From their high thrones in the heaven, With light like Hope to mortals given— But their red orbs, without beam, To thy weariness shall seem As a burning and a fever Which would cling to thee for ever. IV Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish, Now are visions ne’er to vanish; From thy spirit shall they pass No more—like dew-drop from the grass. V The breeze—the breath of God—is still— And the mist upon the hill, Shadowy—shadowy—yet unbroken, Is a symbol and a token— How it hangs upon the trees, A mystery of mysteries!

My father paces the upstairs hall a large confined animal neither wild nor yet domesticated. About him hangs the smell of righteous wrath. My mother is meekly seated at the escritoire. Rosy from my bath age eight-nine-ten by now I understand his right to roar, hers to defy the bill from Wanamaker’s in his hand the bill from Strawbridge’s held high the bill from Bonwit Teller and the all plum-colored Blum Store. His anger smells like dinner parties like trays of frothy daiquiris. Against the pre-World-War-Two prime standing ribs his carving knife flashes a little drunkenly. He charms all the other Bonwit-bedecked wives but something overripe malingers. I wear his wide cigar bands on my fingers. Oh God it is so noisy! Under my bed a secret stair a gold and purple escalator takes me nightly down under the sea. Such dancings, such carryings on with the prince of this-or-that with the duke of ne’er-do-well I the plain one, a size too large to tell grow tremulous at stickpin and cravat I in toe shoes and tutu suddenly see shopping is an art form a kind of costume ball. Papá, would we so humbly come to the scene in the upstairs hall on the first of every month, except you chose the mice for footmen, clapped to call up the coach and four? You sent to Paris for the ermine muff that says I’m rich. To think twelve poor little things had their heads chopped off to keep my hands unseemly warm! When you went fishing down the well for fox furs, hats with peacock plumes velvet evening capes, what else befell? You paid the bills, Papá. You cast the spell.

Mother tried to take her life. The icicles thawed. The house, a wet coat we couldn’t put back on. Still, the garden quickened, the fields were firm. Birds flew from the woods’ fingertips. Among the petals and sticks and browning fruit, we sat in the grass and bickered, chained daisies, prayed. All that falls is caught. Unless it doesn’t stop, like moonlight, which has no pace to speak of, falling through the cedar limbs, falling through the rock.

Something blurred, warmed in the eye’s corner, like woodsmoke becoming tears; but when you turned to look the stoop was still, the pumpkin and tacky mum pot wouldn’t talk — just a rattle at the gutter and a sense of curtains, somewhere, pulled. Five of   them later, scarfing the oak’s black bole, laying a dream of snakes. Needy and reticent at once, these squirrels in charred November recall, in Virgil, what it is to feel: moods, half-moods, swarming, then darting loose; obscure hunches that refuse to speak, but still expect in some flash of   luck to be revealed. The less you try to notice them, the more they will know of  you.

No wise man ever wished to be younger. — Swift 1 Down the long library each marble bust shines unregarded through a shower of dust where a grim ghost paces for exercise in wet weather: nausea, gout, ‘some days I hardly think it worth my time to rise’. Not even the love of friends can quite appease the vertigo, sore ears and inner voices; deep-draughted rain clouds, a rock lost in space, yahoos triumphant in the marketplace, the isle is full of intolerable noises. 2 Go with the flow; no, going against the grain he sits in his rocking chair with a migraine, a light in the church all day till evensong, the sort of day in which a man might hang. No riding out to bubbling stream and weir, to the moist meadow and white belvedere; on tattling club and coffee house a pox, a confederacy of dunces and mohocks — scholars and saints be d-mn’d, slaves to a hard reign and our own miniature self-regard. 3 We emerge from hibernation to ghetto-blasters much better than our old Sony transistors, consensual media, permanent celebration, share options, electronic animation, wave motion of site-specific daffodils, closed-circuit video in the new hotels; for Niamh and Oisín have come to earth once more with blinding breastplate and tempestuous hair, new festive orthodoxy and ironic icon, their faces lit up like the Book of Kells. 4 Defrosting the goose-skin on Bridget’s daughters spring sunlight sparkles among parking meters, wizards on stilts, witches on circus bikes, jokers and jugglers, twitching plastic snakes, pop music of what happens, throbbing skies, star wars, designer genes, sword sorceries. We’ve no nostalgia for the patristic croziers, fridges and tumble-dryers of former years, rain-spattered cameras in O’Connell St., the sound mikes buffeted by wind and sleet — 5 but this is your birthday and I want to recall a first-floor balcony under a shower of hail where our own rowdy crowd stood to review post-Christian gays cavorting up Fifth Avenue, wise-cracking dialogue as quick and dry as that in The Big Sleep or The Long Goodbye; for we too had our season in Tír na nÓg, a Sacred Heart girl and a Protestant rogue, chill sunshine warming us to the very bone, our whole existence one erogenous zone. 6 I could resign these structures and devices, these fancy flourishes and funny voices to a post-literate, audio-visual realm of uncial fluorescence, song and film, as curious symptoms of a weird transition before we opted to be slaves of fashion — for now, whatever the ancestral dream, we give ourselves to a vast corporate scheme where our true wit is devalued once again, our solitude known only to the rain. 7 The one reality is the perpetual flow, chaos of complex systems. Each generation does what it must; middle age and misanthropy, like famine and religion, make poor copy, and even the present vanishes like snow off a rope, frost off a ditch, ice in the sun — so back to the desktop and the drawing board, prismatic natural light, slow-moving cloud, the waves far-thundering in a life of their own, a young woman hitching a lift on a country road.

There’s an Isle, a green Isle, set in the sea, Here’s to the Saint that blessed it! And here’s to the billows wild and free That for centuries have caressed it! Here’s to the day when the men that roam Send longing eyes o’er the water! Here’s to the land that still spells home To each loyal son and daughter! Here’s to old Ireland—fair, I ween, With the blue skies stretched above her! Here’s to her shamrock warm and green, And here’s to the hearts that love her!