“Nun. My esteemed client was with a nun.”
The Poor Clares are as much a part of the tapestry of Galway as the swans.
They are a secluded order,
But they’ve recently gone online!
Go figure.
And they have an outreach program, in the form of Sister Maeve.
A dote of a woman if such can be said of a nun without provocation.
She wasn’t quite yet part of the
Me Too movement but early days.
’Tis a shame but true that in the manic years of the Celtic Tiger the bells of the Poor Clares rang out, a plea for alms.
I cringe to think they might have been hungry.
When you’ve been raised in and to poverty, you are keenly sensitive to the very dread of people without their dinner.
On special days, there is a Mass in the Poor Clares’ convent and the public can attend. They usually have a chorister who’d make you believe in love, such is the beauty of the singing.
The church is lit with candles and has a subdued golden glow, like you’d think a medieval service might have appeared.
It is uplifting in a fashion that is just nigh on impossible to articulate.
Sister Maeve had invited me.
She was my friend.
How weird is that?
Me and the nun.
Believe that?
Years back, I had been of some small service to her and her convent — nothing trailblazing but it dazzled her and thus our unlikely friendship.
The bricks
To raise funds for a renovation to the convent, the public were invited to
“Buy a brick.”
To my disappointment, you didn’t actually get a brick; you got a parchment saying you had donated, so I took a brick from the building site, placed a cross made from horseshoe nails on it, and that did for me.
Looked kind of a piece with the crystal skull some intruder had left for me.
So, the evening that the boy was murdered, I was singing in the choir, so to say,
With Maeve by my side.
Afterward, I took Maeve for a drink to Garavan’s.
Like a date.
Seriously?
We got the snug and I treated her to hot toddies.
She protested,
“I really shouldn’t.”
I said,
“’Tis the glory of it, not being the right thing.”
She took a deep wallop, purred,
“Ah, that is wicked.”
From a nun?
Is there higher endorsement?
The days after my daughter was murdered right before my eyes,
I was beyond
Briste.
Broken, in Irish,
But it means oh so much more,
An utter annihilation of every ounce of your beating, bedraggled heart.
And Maeve came to me
Like a vision, almost.
She fed me,
Doled out rationed amounts of Jay,
Held my trembling palms.
And, I will never quite know why,
She recited a section of what I can only term
The Jesuit poem
“The
Wreck
of
the
Deutschland.”
Serendipity that his poem was dedicated
To the happy memory
Of five Franciscan nuns...
Drowned
Between midnight and morning
Of Dec. 7th, 1875.
Did Maeve select this because my daughter was born in Germany?
Or because those poor nuns were drowned?
As if reading my very thought, she intoned softly,
“Your girl is, and always will be, The Galway Girl.”
Made me weep like a banshee.
Later, when I read about the poet
Gerard Manley Hopkins, I learned he was
An academic
Scholar
Poet
And fiercely unsuccessful with his poetry in his lifetime.
Now, of course, when it’s of precious little value to him, they rave about him being
“One of the very greatest Victorian poets.”
Fuck ’em.
Of the many odd places I end up,
The Protestant Church is unlikely to be one of them.
Not that I have a grudge against the Protestants, it’s just an instinct of not belonging,
Like King Charles on the throne of England.
But here I was
In St. Nicholas.
You can see the imprints of hooves, they say, at the door, supposedly from when Christopher Columbus prayed here before setting off to find America.
They are not the devil’s mark, that’s for sure. He has no business here.
I sat at a back pew, found a modicum of fragile peace, my hand with the mutilated fingers found a sheet of frayed parchment.
It was a fragment of a poem by Robert Bridges,
And the title—
Oh,
Sweet
Jesus
That is not the title, that was my reaction to this:
“On
a
Dead
Child.”
Phew-oh.
Riddle me that?
Perfect little body, without fault or stain on thee....
Thy mother’s treasure wert thou....
Thy hand clasps, as ‘twas wont, my finger, and holds it:
But the grasp is the clasp of death....
Unwilling, alone we embark,
And the things we have seen
And have known
And have heard of
(A long pause is vital here before the killer words.)
Fail us
Here’s the odd thing
I have never been entirely comfortable with the big hitters of poetry,
The
Yeatses
Eliots
Heaneys.
Always more in sync with the minors
Louis MacNeice
Anne Sexton
Francis Thompson.
And among my dark favorites is the leader of the minor league
Totally unknown
Weldon Kees.
Could it be that in 1955, his car was found abandoned on the Golden Gate Bridge and he was never seen again, and
1951 is the year of the birth of one of the minor league mystery novelists?
Weldon’s best poem is, I figured, the coincidentally titled
“Crime Club.”
It has these lines in the opening stanza
... the corpse quite dead.
The wife in Florida.
The second line seems to me to be indicative of great dry humor,
And the two-line ending is a doozy:
Screaming all day of war,
screaming that nothing can be solved.
A friend of Kees’s summed up his sad life in a sentence that might well, alas, apply to my own befuddled existence:
“He was absent from his own life.”
What a fucking condemnation of one man’s time.
These days of hovering depression, despair, and bafflement.
I listened to Snow Patrol’s new album. They had a three-year hiatus while Gary Lightbody battled the booze. He described the wait until five in the evening as he shook and suffered before he could have that drink,