IrelandGenWeb-L Archives

From: "Jean Rice" <>
Subject: [IGW] "MAP" -- James J. McAULEY (b. Dublin 1936)
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 20:35:28 -0800

MAP

I

In six-inch scale, the Mayo baronies
Cover half the wall above my couch.
Bog and mountain, tarn and cascade: I trace
These abrupt crazed contours where the gannet sweeps
Round rock and cliff, the bay below groaning, the wind
Cudgelling the coarse grass flat as it drives inland.

Here, on the narrow slope between crags and sea,
Clan fought clan, the misty cliffs over them,
Searock a false step below, and the Atlantic gale
Drumming their shields with shafts of rain. No peace
Ever visits that shore; no worth in that stony ground.

II

Papers everywhere -- piled onto tables and shelves --
Accounts marked overdue, old magazines, failed poems.
A room occupied too long. Inertia. I should
Give up scanning the map, prone here on the couch,
And like my father take rootless flight.

He was an inconstant collector -- Spode jugs,
The "Complete Works of George Moore," trout flies --
Fads, pawned off in time, to pay for new caprices.
In his last place, the apartment in Beirut,
He spread a dozen Persian rugs, overlapping each other,
Auctioned off after his death. I held on to
His bronze gesturing Shiva, with his little smile.
Has ancestral greed driven us over the earth...?

III

Was it greed for possession of these salty crags
That drove them at each other, wave after wave,
Yelling and stumbling through bulrushes and mire
Between Achill and the Bellacorick marsh?
No one records the outcome, no one knows the victor:
"Place of Great Slaughter," the name in Irish on the map.

When the blighted stalks
Lay cracked and brown above
The harrow-rows, the lean
Poets stopped their singing
By the blackened hearth and sought
The exile ship in the cove,
Or death released them from
Mourning the pestilence
That shadowed every face,
And rage against the tyrant
Whose greed fostered famine
Rattled in their throats.

IV

Rage swept them across the Vistula, Danube, Elbe,
Before they had names for rivers. They hammered
Images into bronze and gold to shield them
For the crossing to the Isles of Bliss they dreamt
Beyond the storms. Now they have spanned oceans
And given their names to places they stayed in
Hardly long enough to light a fire or dig a grave.

My father learned to navigate the old way,
By the stars -- could fly a course
>From Ganges to Euphrates -- knew half the globe
>From the air. The Ides of March: taking off
>From Tehran, his plane crashed at the edge
Of a place that is called in Persian "Desert of Salt."

"Twenty thousand feet above the Aegean,
Setting course for Alexandria...
If you can get to Basel I can meet you
And take you on to Beirut." His letter folded
Round the cash for the fare, but I bought instead
A box of secondhand books, and stayed home
In a littered room, to doze to Haydn; to put down
The pen, lost for words, considering the map,
The pibroch sounding, the warriors shouting.

The gannet settles
On a narrow ledge
Between rowdy waves
And rain-laden clouds.
On the slope of great slaughter
A mountain ash raises
Its one stricken limb.

-- James J. McAuley (b. Dublin 1936)
In memory of his father,
Capt. J. Noel McAuley,
1908-1963

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• [IGW] "MAP" -- James J. McAULEY (b. Dublin 1936) by "Jean Rice" <>