I’d said to the waiter, “Well, we’re in Donegal. Might as well try the Silkie.” Warm, a bit raw and painful. Still, I had another whiskey. This one rubbed knowingly at my throat and dropped to my belly with intent. He asked if I liked the Silkie. I searched his eyes. “Very much.” “Come with me,” he said, almost yanking my seat. Out front he pulled open a drawer with a map, spread it and stubbed his finger just west of the Hotel. “I live here.” Then he pulled it over three begs lying in the North Atlantic. With the last he said, “These are the highest cliffs in all of Europe! They make the Cliffs of Moher look like nothin.” Bunglas sits over six hundred meters of sky. The very next day I was there looking down the freefall into the terror of the ocean. Heights call to me, dizzy. On the map it looked like up, as if I could fly but crash into the fathomless ceiling, the beginnings that this mountain grew out of. With my spyglass I saw distant white globs of bodies on the rocks below like the sheep salted all over the green heights above. Seabirds? They sang to me in the music of wind on sea, an intimate and cool language we’ve always heard. I readied to leap for the leavings of family. I sing in the wisps of my leavings, this face, these sudden lips from New York snow above acorns and squirrel dung, sod of a billion bits of oak, maple, beech, the needles of pine, the nest of titmouse, blue eggs of the robin; cicada shells muffling the hawks’ screech, even the mole not too deep to breath! My white face looks up to the spades of time. My father’s grandmother – a chick in prairie brick gone back to American mud and hay. I gaze into the pain of my America, the terror and the building: the plains of Illinois, deadly cold and concrete Chicago. Now the mountains of the northeast, deadly cold and building my ending – a wife, children, a home that wants to crumble and leave these hills to their elemental selves, to the inhuman spirit of stone and bark and bone. I am the fire released from the trees I fell, cut to size, split, transformed to ash. My song burns like whiskey. It says “friend, I love you in the death of us all, in the Silkie who craves our deserving guts.” ///// Dennis Doherty is author of four volumes of poetry: The Bad Man (Ye Olde Fontshoppe Press, 2004), Fugitive (Codhill Press, 2007), Crush Test (Codhill Press 2010), and Black Irish (Codhill Press 2016). He has also written a partial memoir, partial historical study, Why Read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New Street Communications, 2014). Essays, poems, and stories appear throughout the literary press. He teaches creative writing and literature at SUNY New Paltz. Read more of Dennis Doherty’s work here on Lightwood. Click on our Search Button.
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