The worst is to come upon them after. Pale blue hue, eyes bulging, blood dark on the floor and bright on glass. You feel that is all your mind is - glass. A grave diving horror reaches out for the last time you saw him. You were walking down the gulch. Said something about if there was magic in the old days it didn’t go away. We did. He talked about why he always wore boots. You can’t remember what he said. You should have known, though it would not have mattered, when he said, “when I die, I want to be cremated.”
“Why you telling me this?”
“So you can roll me up and smoke me.”
A few days of rooms full of trembling hands, feint smiles, eyes you never saw so dark before, and all you want to do is head for the woods, but even that seems crazy. Everyone wanting to know why, and you thought of so many smart ass things to say when people would ask you. There was nothing left. He no longer enjoyed his own farts. As a chemist, it was unacceptable. Things he would have laughed at.
At the end of it his mother comes out of the bedroom she had disappeared to for so long as you lay his sister down dead drunk on the couch. The mother of darkness moves with the sound of windy silk and strokes her hair.
“Thank god she’s nothing like him,” she whispers.
She hands you a small piece of paper without looking at you. Pale blue sticky note. You look at it and on it is your name scrawled in pencil, hard, with a smiley face in the O.
“It was in his boot,” she says.
You look out the window and see the snow still on the highlands clinging to the scars of hard rock beneath the moonlight.
Out on the porch Lucy and Derek are asleep, and old uncle Lucky is on the old davaneu staring off at the stars. You close your eyes and feel your soul hurtling through the exploding abyss of the universe. You hear a voice speak in every fiber of your being. You do not know what any of this means.
And you know it’s him. Inside of you, outside of time.
You can hear the 150 ton engines in the pit. You can see the dust settling along the divide. You realize you are not what you are. And there is no love through love.
***
There's an old gaelic saying "love hides disgust." I grew up understanding the big parade day was more an American than an Irish invention in that, as a certain Harrington explained it to me, "on this day, all people get to be Irish, it isn't just what's in your blood, but what's in your eye." Everyone has to have some form of distinction. Shane McGowan, after all, is not exactly unheard of wherever the reels may echo; Indeed, I've known some that stayed afloat well into their '80's. False pride is a cheap trinket sold outside the baptistrey when the bells can't stop ringing in all those swollen, whiskey soaked brains. But there are these moments, you know, when all the barriers seem to break down. Yes, it is an illusion, and yes, I remember children dancing on the plank. But for an instant here and there it seems like everyone is reflecting everyone, and the old ladies who only go out once a year say stoof like "donna get me wrong sonny, I love the old country, but I wouldn't trade a yard a where I stand now for an acre of that misery over there." Things change. They claimed it as their own that which mystifies and curses since the times of the Nile. The Hibernians will sing of Ragland Road, and toss one back for Bobby Sands. Me, I celebrated reading Heaney to my son whom I named after him...then drank a pint of Guiness. For the road is long and wet and hard to see and it is important to reflect on how one may fall.
***
If only money were the only thing. If only love or bitterness. All of it chews and all of it tears at that time your brother fell down the stairs and all you could do was laugh. You carry an edge because you couldn’t save your sister from the world, astounded that your mother was not a virgin and you are not the only son of man. So Ride the donkey, bang the bong, blame your pain on whatever comes along. The rich man parked his Lamborghini on my balls, he smashed his whiskey up and down my halls. The poor man fell asleep on the dime I lost, I can’t remember who actually nailed me to this cross. Every breath goes in like the next great gasp, tripping mad down puppy love lane, with dreams of remaining somehow sane. Reach out for the money, reach out for the gun. Let the light out of your eyes, it’s no sin to have a little fun. Inside us all the cancer grows, dancing to the music of 1,000 Jim Crows. A little plant struggles inside your window, it doesn’t need to know what anything is. Dirty Harry was a flower child. If only money were the only thing. If only bitterness. Take me home and bury me in your bed and forget everything we said. We must be leaving, leaving soon, we must escape from all these rooms. The apostles laughed at The Rich Young Man when he ran in madness away. Jesus wrote something in the sand. The only word he ever wrote. We must be leaving soon, we must escape all these rooms.
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