At the Wild Goose Tavern those many nights they’d talked earnestly of life, death, poetry, music. The films of Jim Jarmusch, which Ned Spires too admired: not surprisingly, his favorite was Paterson. (Though his favorite filmmaker was Andrei Tarkovsky.) Is there God, is there an afterlife, is there meaning in life. What do we owe one another, how do our lives intersect? Can we love, deeply, more than once? Must we love, deeply, more than once?

Unexpected, absurd—Juliana was entranced by Ned Spires. His skin was pocked with ancient acne scars, his eyes were often haggard. Merriment lay over his face like a cobweb, there were deep frown and smile lines beside his eyes. Ned too was a drinker.

In the Wild Goose Tavern, which was near a large urban university, Ned Spires reigned over the bar, in his hoarse-mellifluous voice reciting poems by W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, John Berryman. Surprising how many drinkers at the Wild Goose listened to poetry, enthralled by Ned Spires’s voice.

He’d been born in County Galway and was brought by his very young parents to the United States, to Boston, as a child of three. After four decades in the States, his accent was still Irish-inflected. His preferred drink was Irish whiskey straight, but for most occasions Guinness Extra Stout from the tap.

Juliana was acquiring a taste for the dark, bitter ale. You had to swallow hard once, twice, to get a mouthful down. That taste at the back of the tongue like a dark spreading stain.

So much in life is negotiable, Juliana came to see. What she’d disliked and disdained she might learn to like very much. Under the proper tutelage.

Her first glimpse of Ned Spires, he’d been unprepossessing. Subsequently she’d come to see that if you looked closely and if you listened to Ned, he was really a beautiful man.

She’d come to love the very sound of the name: Ned Spires. Confused with the waterfall neon in the Wild Goose, glimmering lights reflected against the man’s face and her face and in the mirror behind the bar behind shelves of bottles.

And in the front seat of his car the first night they were alone together. Drawing her fingertips over the warm, blotched skin of the man’s face as a blind woman might draw marveling fingertips over Braille.

Ned Spires’s poetry was the poetry of celebration but also, being Irish, the poetry of privation. Deprivation. Bitter loss, stoic resignation. He hadn’t ever believed he deserved to be happy, Ned told her.

Ravished by her. He said. His eyes on her, worshipful. But she was too young, or was he too old? (Only forty-three. Not old. Except for his thinning coppery hair and bruised eyes, he’d have looked years younger.)