Alice Lyons

When I boarded the plane, everyone looked like Uncle Tom ruddy, some were empurpled gray hair or auburn in terrier thatches pale blue of eye a smidgen of resignation: the tribe. I thought We are driving to the interior I thought holy god the airline upholstery was Yeats, Kavanagh and Heaney handwriting. I thought holy shit, this is the maw. The maw.

She pronounces Chama the name of the milky green river with a richness in the ch I cannot muster, puts a hard d on the end of her and s. anD. anD. anD. Like the river she is asking to be endless anD shifting. To stream. I’d scouted the knoll of oaks for rattlers, being beyond the bounds of Coverage having no means to learn their habits. So I lay down with her on the ground. Their ground. AnD I willed to forget the cares of my later-in-life job search. Job. Which is also Job, a man in the Bible. Which is a book. The oaks of the knoll were leaning into the Chama like girls washing their hair in basins. I thought of EB shampooing Lota, of Frost’s birches, of Plath’s Wych elms which I’d like to have googled. Did snakes favor oak knolls? Did Georgia O’Keeffe worry about health insurance costs in Abiquiú? AnD beside me my love streaming, her poodles distantly nosing the chamisa. Standards. I thought I had them. Put art at the front of the queue wych is different from quiú. AnD now this. Biblical the proportions of this breaking-back-into-a-country-I’d- locked-myself-out-of phase. Was it scenic? I liked the pachysandra, branches of oak taking all that space from the sky. But then everybody disappeared to their offices. Three times I wrote work work work when woke was what I wanted to write. Miniature is the acorn I fingered in the soft flour-sack pocket of my jeans. Acorn smaller than East Coast or indeed Irish Oak varieties wych she handed me anD how hungrily I pocketed its little body.

The brook is this mix of roar & hiss as if God has managed to scalpel a section of tempest & clothespin it in the woods Over There Always draped in the trees while we eat white summer peaches from celadon bowls while the sun bleaches & blue jay squawks score the maple, oak birch and apple-treed sky with their oblique Scriabin musics. Fifteen years since I have seen a real Fall her deciduous burlesque, her glistering things sifting on the old cider mill. A holy show. I hold a wooden fragrance & a sodden mush of crushed flowing apples in a cache and will never give it up. The cardinal is the best bird because it is a red mark on the blank snow amid the charcoal Twombly of maple, oak birch and apple branches. Pines are green & faraway, don’t figure. My sister in spring is even prettier, her smile the genuine quality of it undiminished in the many months since I have been in Happy Valley. It roars and is constantly in spate because it has its reasons spring being spring plus my visiting.

Greed got in the way. We built a fake estate. Levinas said to see ourselves we need each other yet doorbells, rows of them, glow in the night village a string of lit invitations no elbow has leaned into (both arms embracing messages). Unanswered the doors are rotting from the bottom up. It’s another perplexing pothole in our road, loves. Hard core from the quarry might make it level, hard core and cunning speculation into matters concerning love and doubt, concerning want and plenty. O the places where pavement runs out and ragwort springs up, where Lindenwood ends but doesn’t abut anywhere neatly, a petered-out plot of Tayto tumbleweeds, bin bags, rebar, roof slates, offcuts, guttering, drain grilles, doodads, infill, gravel! A not-as-yet nice establishment, possessing potential where we have no authorized voice but are oddly fitted out for the pain it takes to build bit by bit. When the last contractions brought us to the brink of our new predicament, we became developers.

The Shannon when it washes the shoreline in the wake of a cruiser susurruses exactly like the Polish language you hear in lidl on Friday evenings, 7 pm payday. That’s what Gerry says. • The river surface offers space to the song: hammer taps of Latvians and Poles nailing planks of a deck.        The place between water and sky holding sound. It is under- loved and an amphitheater. • Latvians and Lithuanians are nailing planks of grooved decking. It will be a nice feature of that riverside property. Their tap-tapping underscores the distance between this side and that. • Winter gales have made swift work of the billboard proclaiming 42 luxury bungalows only two remaining