Three years into exile (2021)

I was sent here at twenty

Ut operaretur terram de qua sumptus sum,—

And hiding in the indecipherability of my verses,

Stood amber-eyed by the road that led to your city:

I have long forgotten the message they bid me tell you

Nor am I writing this du mon cachot with my greasy

Hands and my greying eye to try to remember:

I am past all pretense: I am mad at the world.

In Éire, too, the kings have long fled their cities:

And the people, too, have long forgotten their names:

And the saints, foolish as God had made them, had stayed,

Gregem gerendum, believing no time is too late for

Salvation: I have never been to Hibernia, and my

Father, and his father before him, had only known this

City to be the world: and in their ignorance (as God had

Made them) lived and loved and laughed and died inside

Its walls: Oh that thou shouldst scoop the eyes out of this

My skull and pull this my tongue with a forceps, as they had done

Thee, Mother, nimica di ciascun crudele (or so thou hadst

Them believe) and by this one act in Domini grege numerer.

I have left behind the city of my birth where in the summer the

Air was perfumed with mud and mango blossoms; the seashore

Some thirty minutes from where I found myself living these

Three years since I had left is rock-ribbed and smelled of piss.

On the horizon I can see the white boats that lent the mise-en-scène

Some respite from its own dullness: then farther, still, the littlest

Hint of what remains of the countryside: an amorphous blob of

Grey and green dotted by white. I have been here every week:

Besides the food-truck that sold day-old food, under a palm tree

Whose trunk some vandal had painted white, I have found

The perfect place to cry.

Who am I to wage war on God? Not that I ever believed that what

Hibernian monster some fevered ninth-century dream had concocted

Would have in the end led my brother to hang himself: or that

He was weak (as their augurs had predicted) or that he was

Unworthy (as their autopsy had revealed). I whispered my

Diagnosis to my mother, nimica di ciascun crudele, (or so

She had them believe), my raspy voice melting in the mechanical

Hum of that March evening: à noite todos os gatos são—

I was unable to utter the last word, ashamed, perhaps, trembling,

Terrorized by how her brows arched perfectly, how her lips were

Always hinting at a smile (but never did). We prayed, as good

Christians did, nine days and nine nights, until his name was the

Only one I remembered. The orange of the candlelight at dusk

Before anyone had the mind to turn the lights on in the living-room

Waltzed with the night’s purple in my mother’s face and mine.

I almost understood what it meant to believe in God.