Them back, could slice their skin to

Pieces as they sleep, & turn

In their sleep. They still won't eat,

But lie silently as glass

Shattered in houses, or small

Hawks that have fallen a long

Way, broken or frozen blind

By snow, their eyes wide open

But no longer noticing

The simplest detail, a fly,

A drop of water, the smoke

Of some passing train scrawled on

A sky that stays there, above

Any reason for a sky.

IRISH MUSIC

Now in middle age, my blood like a thief who

Got away, unslain, & the trees hung again in the grim,

Cheap embroidery of leaves, I come back to the white roads,

The intersections in their sleeves of dust,

And vines like woodwinds twisted into shapes

For playing different kinds of silence.

Just when my hearing was getting perfect, singular

As an orphan's shard of mirror, they

Change the music into something I

No longer follow.

But how like them to welcome me home this way:

The house with its doorstep finally rotted away,

And carted off for a stranger's firewood,

And yet, behind the window there,

A woman bent over a map of her childhood, but still

A real map, that shows her people's

Ireland like a bonnet for the mad on top of

Plenty of ocean.

Hunger kept those poor relations traveling until

They almost touched the sea again,

And settled.

And there have been changes, even here.

In Parlier, California,

The band in the park still plays the same song,

But with a fresher strain of hopelessness.

This, too, will pass.

That is the message, always, of its threadbare refrain,

The message, too, of what one chooses to forget

About this place: the Swedish tail gunner who,

After twenty missions in the Pacific, chopped off

His own left hand

To get back home. No one thinks of him;

Not even I believe he found another reason, maybe,

For all left hands. So memory sires

Oblivion—this settlement of sheds, & weeds,

Where the last exile which the bloodstream always sang

Comes down to a matter of a few sparrows hopping

On & off a broken rain gutter, or downspout, & behind them,

A barn set up on a hill & meant to stay there,

Ignoring the sky

With the certainty they bolted into the crossbeams—

The whole thing

Towering over the long silent

Farmer & his wife; & that still house

Where their fingers have remembered, for fifty years,

Just where to touch the bannister; & then the steps,

That, one day, led up to me. Come home,

Say the blackened, still standing chimneys, & the missing bell

Above the three-room schoolhouse—

You've inherited all there is: the ironic,

Rueful smile of a peasant who's extinct,

Who nods, understanding, too well, the traveler,

And who orders another shot of schnapps

While his wife, pregnant, angry, puts both hands

Under her chin, & waits up.

And always, I pack the car, I answer no….

When my own son was next to nothing,