Moon Ghosts

The Andalusia moon would be full tomorrow.

Mad as hell caged hunting dogs howled high anxiety on western Sierra mountains with an excellent view of a white bone marble spinning through sky inside clouds of pleasure and pain as rolling valleys dreamed of planting and harvest.

Spanish men in sturdy boots carried tools of time’s labor through fields below the rising moon. When full they would not go to the fields, the river, the forests or the mountains after dusk. They owned the day and spirits controlled night. They respected magic.

Dogs bayed and howled through sunset into dusk of rising orange clouds as the moon rose through the either.

The men passed the cemetario on their way to the harvest. It was quiet there. The small church door was open, it’s scared thick and heavily bolted brown wood a thick piece of old resistance. The alter decoration was a simple Virgin Mary crying blood. The altar cloth was changed daily by a woman in black doing her duty saying her life’s penance through intention and devotion.

A forcestero, a person from outside the pueblo, a stranger with a camera passed her and she thought she recognized his shadow.

”A ghost. Yes, that’s all it was, a figment of a soul visiting friends.”                                 

She blessed herself twice with bird-winged fingers watching men walk to their land. It was the end of a warm winter day and the sun had disappeared with Egyptian vultures in heaven. She locked the black gate leading to a series of crypts.

The stranger was here yesterday doing his reconnaissance. Today he worked inside the second metal gate, inside the sanctuary, inside the crypt area. Four walls held the departed. Engraved stones revealed names, dates, places, memories, children, and adults back to 1896. He made images under the green smoky eyes of a Siamese cat on a red tiled roof.

Workers had left their crypt construction bricks, cleaning solution, black buckets and rags in empty crevices. Rectangles waited for ornate boxes. Boxes made in a casket factory miles and lives away. Caskets with handles for hands. Brown and black religiously lined caskets with satin pillows. Pillows softer than language mumbled through tears of the living seeing everything before trembling eyes with hearts beating like drums.

After church services in the village of 2,300 caskets were dispatched in long black cars with wreaths of infinite sweet smelling floral varieties to the black gate and carried on shoulders of strong men past the open church door, a palm tree and through a black gate on rusty hinges and slid into an empty domain.              

The cold gray cement cavities had brick ceilings. The forcestero stared inside an empty space. It was long. It was empty and it was cold. It stretched to eternity.

He stepped out of death's shadow. He heard men in fields using their tools on hard winter ground. They were above the ground. “Any day above ground is a good day,” a ghost whispered.

He listened and went to work.

In fast fading light he imaged interments with names and flowers, passages of memory in love and sadness, chiseled history and their connection to pueblo life. He focused down cavities and shells of rectangular rows of empty passages. They were invisible stories waiting to be told. Waiting for air to carry them to listening faithful. They were silent stories, silent night of the pious silent with collective breathing. 

“The rest is silence,” said Shakespeare.

The woman turned away from men and their shadows bent over fields moving rocks toward dreams and fence plans, pruning dead growth from olive trees along a river and saw the ghost working among shadows of the dead.

Her husband was there. She held his final whisper in her silent heart. “I almost wish it were true.”

She was the silent moon above her bone white memory, a spirit guide serving spirits. She joined the moon.

When he finished his work the forcestero flew away from the cemetario, river stones and fields where men worked their trust, his vapor rising to the moon.            

Their spirit energies manifested their destiny with the moon as dogs howled below them.

 A Century is Nothing

Invent a God

Broken glittering glass edges reflecting an elegant universe magnified the tears of an Iraqi girl burying her parents in a white shroud of cloth, an old flag of final surrender.

Tree leaves blasted green to deep yellow and brown. They flew into a river. They gathered on boulders clogging the Rio Guadalete and dolomite waterfalls. One leaf did a lot of damage. The river needed cleaning.

"See," said the Grand Inquisitor ringing his broken Spanish bell, "it’s all possible. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted if there is no God."

Everything you know is a lie.

"Let’s invent a God," said a pregnant nun supporting her nose habit. "We need reason and faith to believe in a higher power."

"Reason and faith are incompatible," said a logic board filled with circular flux reactors.

"Look," said Little Nino, "I found a compass and it works. The needle is pointing to magnetic north. This may help us. I am a compass without a needle.”

Ahmed read the instructions. "Great Scott! It says one sharp line of description is better than any number of mundane observations."

"You don’t need a compass in the land of dreams," said a mother. "We need all the direction we can handle."

"Maybe one direction is enough," said a cartographer.

"If you need a helping hand," said another, "look at the end of your wrist."

"O wise one, tell us another," cried a disembodied voice.

"Ok, how about this," someone said. "Our days of instant gratification are a thing of the past."

"Looks like everything is a thing of the past," observed a child sifting dust particles at Ground Zero on 9/11.

"You’re wiser than your years."

"That’s an old saw with a rusty blade cutting through desire, anger, greed, ignorance and suffering."

"Yes," said a child, "there are two kinds of suffering."

"What are they?" asked another orphan.

"There’s suffering you run away from and suffering you face,” said a child arranging leaves on blank pages inside her black book.

A Century is Nothing

Life Essentials Post 9/11

Tribal adults and children survivors of 9/11 sifted through leftovers searching for sustainable resources. They needed essentials: food, shelter, water, air, sex and stories.

"This is the day of my dreams," said a girl with a diamond in her mind watching fireworks explode over the Willamette Valley in Eugene on the fourth of July. Her wisdom mind reflected 10,000 things.

Yangon, Burma

Omar opened his book, traced braille and read.

“The honorable monkey mind trickster wandered through her expansive museum sensing pure intention, motivation and reflections. If she is not careful and paying complete attention the monkey mind will run wild splashing green jealous slashes, red anger strokes, and blue attachment colors on her beautiful canvases. While some ignored it at their peril others respected monkey mind and kept an eye on it with respect and dignity.”

“It was a mindfulness,” said a woman sketching shadows.

"Now I see why Picasso painted Guernica in 1937," said a blond kid kicking stones, raising dust.

"Everything we love is going to die."

"Yes, we accept loss forever."

She cleaned her canvas with a camelhair brush while leaning against a wall of sound. The echo was deafening. Silence is the loudest noise in the world.

"Picasso was a great thief," said a museum curator. "When you see his work you see the influence of all great artists."

"The ancient texts predicted this," said Other, a seer.

He sat in a pile of splintered wood sharpening the edge of his knife on a small piece of flint taken from his old sweater pocket. Sunlight glistened off his finely honed Spanish blade as he worked it under the skin of a pear. 

"They talked about choices and unintended consequences," said a woman digging for water.

"I’m thirsty," said Little Nino.

"Be patient my child."

"Yes, said Jamie. "It takes faith."

"You can’t take faith to the bank," replied a girl.

"True," said Other, "faith doesn’t know where the bank is."

"A bank is what holds the river together," said a child.

"Faith is a woman in this tribal tale."

"It will take more than Faith," someone said stumbling over piles of discarded twisted logic.

"Speaking of falling faulty twin towers, it will require firm resolve, an unyielding capacity for vengeance, retaliation, and retribution in this living memory," said Lloyd, an unemployed insurance underwear writer from classless London. His three-piece Brooks Brothers suit was in shreds.

"It’s because of the amygdala," counseled a doctor.

"What’s that?" said Little Nino.

"It’s a location of the brain where fear lives. It’s a knot of nerve cells and tissues. We think anger lives there as well but we don’t know for sure."

“Yes," said Alfredo Jari, “memory is the duration of the transformation of a succession into a reversion. In other words, any internal obstruction of the flow of the mobile molecules of the liquid, any increase in viscosity is nothing other than consciousness.”

“Can you put that in plain English?" pleaded a lit major.

“Yes I can but I won’t.”

“Their collective archetypical memory was heavier than collective unconscious and lighter than consciousness,” said an analyst named Jung.

Lighter than wind.

Fat democratic spectators cheered from sidelines. Consumers swallowed bitter tears of greed and desire.

Let’s go shopping to reduce our fear of poverty, said nations of sheep.

“The archetype can't be whole or complete if it doesn’t allow for the expression of both good and evil in the conscious or unconscious,” drooled a sedated American soldier in a VA hospital wheelchair. He needed an exit strategy.

“More drugs, nurse!” he screamed. “I coulda’ been somebody. I could'a been contender!”

All he received was his pitiful wailing voice echoing in empty chambers.

On a movie set medicated military reservist wives dressed as cheerleaders jumped up and down in wild mind agitated states of abandon. They filed for divorce after taking lovers while their husbands looked for improved body armor in oppressive Middle East desert heat.

They were the undereducated doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful.

Other visualized their death while poverty’s heirs prayed that instant replay would change reality. 

A Century is Nothing

Moon Cartoon Town

Beyond the forest on comet tails South of North Star near a state mental hospital and directly across Nugget Sound-Bite from Paradise Prison full criminals doing hard time, he passed through a small conservative town of 1,001 retired military guys and gals. Every house displayed a large American flag on its stoop.

Blowing in the wind.

He needed a haircut.

Incorporated in 1848 by religious fanatics from Siberia, Moon had a city hall, asphalt tennis court with a broken net, a restored drugstore with Native American artifacts and pharmaceutical histories, public security department and Indian tribal cultural center museum.

There was a post office, dentist, bank, small market, church, pub and deli - a converted gas station selling high octane java to drivers - well manicured lawns with roses and annuals, an upscale dining establishment and ferry service to neighboring islands.

A heavy-set blond woman, wearing wrap around sunglasses, blue jean shorts, a white t-shirt and tennis shoes hesitated at the door of a barbershop.

She was on Insane Street. A red and white striped barber pole rotated in its glass container outside the gray one room building needing a fresh coat of paint. Inside were three black leather barber chairs, two metal folding chairs and outdated Hunting & Flagellating magazines. The barber had a neatly trimmed beard. Out back a small dog kennel sat near a rusting van with a fundamentalist religious bumper sticker, "Jesus Loves U."

“Can I get a trim?” she asked.

“Sure,” said the barber.

“How long will it be?”

“About twenty minutes.”

“Do you take checks?”

“Sure.”

She went out, sat smoking in her car for a minute, got out, slammed the door, came back in and sat down. The barber was finishing a customer.

She started talking.

“I’m taking sixteen to eighteen pills a day,” she said to no one in particular. She turned toward an old man reading the obituaries in a paper-thin daily newspaper.

“I knew it would never happen with the guy at work,” she said. “He started seeing someone else on another floor of the hospital. He cheated ME. He never really opened his true heart. He put people under. He was a divorced anesthesiologist with a three-year old kid he never saw. His ex-wife was a lawyer and they made some deal, an arrangement about life without parole. He loved me. But he wasn’t in love with me. That’s the difference. Do you live here?”

He looked up. “Yes, twenty years now. I think you are a strong person.”

“Actually, I’m a wimp.”

He laughed knowing better.

“True,” she said, “I’m just average.”

The man told her things. He influenced her. They were vulnerable. Her old history of fear, anger and resentment was about trust, loss of self and manipulating men to get them involved, in bed with a warm security blanket and then out of her life.

The old man knew about martyrs and the futility of rescuing women. Being human they were both predators. He was available without making her uncomfortable no pressure no expectations.

He was willing to be vulnerable.

She asked his age.

“All I know is that I’m retired from the Army. After that I worked at the state hospital.”

“Is it true they tie them down there? I heard they kept people tied down for fifteen years.”

“No. I never saw anyone tied down unless they were married to their insanity.”

“Are you married to your insanity?” she asked him.

“My wife died two years ago. We celebrated our 50th anniversary and she died two years later.”

“Will you get married again? Insanity is a blessing.”

“No. I won’t get married again. Marriage is like a business deal with bad sex.”

She took off her glasses revealing layers of dark smudged eyeliner.

Trucks loaded with cement, paper products and garbage rumbled past the open door throwing dust into air.

“Yeah,” she said, “well, my ex-husband works at the nut house and he has trouble with them people so he’ll probably sue.”

She kept talking to no one in particular hoping someone would listen.

They talked about everything but mostly he listened to her pain. They shared emotions and feelings and she was surprised at his openness. Stories with detachment increased emotional truth and trust.

They enjoyed hours of conversations filled with laughter and insight, confronting grief and loss and discovering their authentic self. Their communication bills were staggering.

They were lost, looking, open and honest.

They talked about their dysfunctional families, the absence of love in their respective families, her gay brothers and the sexual humiliations they faced. 

“I worked in a hospital once,” she said. “I hated the stress of working in an operating room during heart surgeries, how some of the ancient surgeons were inept with their chauvinist attitudes. I felt uncomfortable working with an ex-boyfriend, so I quit. I’m not good at handling this breakup. I need to find a new job. I need to get a life.”

She started in again. She was a broken record of life’s miscarriages.

Aborted possibilities lurked inside her screaming heart.

“When I met him I was a model, size five. Look at me now. I can’t believe I’ve let myself go. I did lingerie and bathing suits. Look at me now. I’ve joined weight watchers and lost five pounds.”

“Off with her HEAD!” screamed the Queen.

No one said anything. The barber cut and dried.

She blasted hot air. “I’ve been in a couple of films, if I can’t get back in films I’m not going to do anything.”

The barber finished, shook off the plastic sheet, pushed white metal numbers on an old wooden cash register ringing up the sale. The woman stood outside the shop smoking.

“Nice haircut,” she said as he passed her.

After the barbershop conversation and discovering cosmological stamps of nebulas at a post office he entered a local day care center full of violence and neglect after seeing a child get slammed into a door by a caretaker.

He started to say, “Excuse me…it’s none of my business...” and stopped, seeing a girl dragging abused kids into the cramped office.

The exhausted receptionist said, “May I help you?”

He switched gears. “How much does it cost?” 

“$135 a week.”

“What are your hours?”

“5:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. M-F.”

Ok, he thought, the woman is going to talk to the girl about the petrified kids.

The halls reminded him of a nursing home. He wondered if parents working in some office had any idea what went on in these places. What really happened to their kids during the day?

Temporary jobs for undereducated, unskilled and poorly trained child care providers. Looks good on the outside, all the advertising, bright yellow buses and plastic gym toys in the yard.

One wonders how the effect of early childhood mauling inflicted hard fast lessons of FEAR for future child development construction projects.

We go to these places when young. We go when old, paying people to take care of us. In between the beginning and end of life adults dropped us off, picked us up or left us alone to figure it out. The only difference was years and quality health care. Dynamics.

Random acts of kindness inside wire fences and behind metal doors needed a way out of a labyrinth without a center.

A Century is Nothing

silence, exile, cunning

I reached Downings in wild northern Donegal on the shore of Sheephaven Bay. Downings had a population of a few hundred, an ideal place for camping in a caravan, golfing, dancing, and vacations from urban life during short summer months. There was a tweed factory, a grocery store with bottled gas for residents and visitors, pubs, small hotels, a sweater and scarf shop. 

Carrigart, a mile away was larger with a church, post office and small shops. I thumbed a ride with Pat driving a weekly Friday minivan to and from Melmore Head into Carrigart so local people could get in for shopping. He’d never seen someone standing along the road with a fire engine red word machine.

I climbed aboard, thanked him for stopping and we climbed high along the Atlantic Drive with exquisite views of bays and shorelines unfolding like perpetual flowers.

Women passengers rattled away in Gaelic. I processed new language.

“Is he a warlock?” Deirdre of the Sorrows whispered.

“I’m not sure we want to find out,” Mary, a virgin, said. “Maybe a Druid. Let him be.”

“Just as well. Well, I never,” said Deirdre. Mary nodded with a solemn expression across her deeply lined face. They studied their sturdy shoes. Built for comfort, not for speed. They were disinfected against English hoof and mouth viruses. They left attachments alone.

They remarked how isolated Donegal was in winter and asked was I alone? “Oh,” one said, when the conversation turned to my portable machine, “Is it a book you’re working on and how is it coming along?”

“It’s a process. I’m incorporating various Irish themes, like isolation, violence, hatred, anger and fear. I include gaiety, laughter, love for music, verse, a good craic, witty erudite conversation, the ability to laugh at oneself, self deprecation, and finding pleasure in small simple things, small simple elegant ways of life.”

“Yes,” said one woman. “That’s a mouthful. How grand!”

“So it is,” I replied pulling out yellow lined paper.

“This is Empirical Evidence. I use it for a first draft making notes as I go along. It’s perfect for this kind of job.”

I showed them the bold blue word 'Evidence.'

“It collects source material, because we remain open. We acknowledge we are the source, in a sense, beyond sense really, we are the fundamental shift, each of us possesses the innate universal capability to create and embrace metta, the loving kindness that permeates through the various meridians - we tap into the source, we transmute through fields of energy, resolving, flowing toward the source, the infinite vibrations of love.”

The women were stoned. Dolmans.

I rattled on, “Some authors prefer to use these yellow papers when they create stories, characters and the motivation which carries them from scene to scene. It flows. I write with a cloud pen on mirrors. Creating amnesia. The clouds should know me by now. It’s a strange mixture of life and death, so it is.”

They stared in amazement listening to my blue streak. They’d swear I was on fire.

“I’m reminded of a journal I purchased in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia. Lovely place, that. Primitive, rice paddies, jungle, magical mysterious light. Ambient. Gentle people. Every day is a celebration. Nine levels of language depending on their caste system.”

I switched back to varieties of paper products.

“Yes, it’s a tight, flat, hard rough paper, badly stitched and all, and while it is useful and shaking in laughter it is not as free as this evidence. Two more journals are filled. One sits empty & blank.

“You cannot tear out the pages in a journal unless you want to upset the balance, the conformity, but with this, yes, you must remove each yellow bird call from its throat. My goals are to freely develop and strengthen my creative identity. I accept my playful personality and cultivate an inner attitude of strength. I will destroy old myths, preconceptions and false lies. My path will toughen my skin while leaving my interior soft and pliable.”

The women had never heard anything like this before.

“Enjoyment is Puer Aeternus or ‘eternal youth’ and, in a sense, that’s what I’ve been doing, living and being for God knows how long as an arrested adolescent. I was crystallized at an early age.

“I finally confronted my perceived laziness and stalling. They are buzzwords, you know what I mean, buzzwords of an autocratic, punishing consciousness. That’s the price I pay for being raised a Catholic. Way too much emotional and physical abuse and suffering in my family if you know what I mean.”

The women rolled their eyes toward heaven and blessed themselves with the speed of an illusionist. The hand - a tool with opposable thumbs, quite remarkable grasping anything of value an age old dilemma for masses. Faster than the eye.

Their dancing hands revealed stories. Stories about waiting and patience, patience enlarging, expanding space creating the illusion of grandeur, opulence and distance.

“Yes,” I said. “If you can hold it in your hand it’s not important. An open hand holds everything.”

I almost started telling the women about the wild monkey mind construct from an Eastern point of view - one of those ancient stories they’d never heard of - and then I remembered, speaking of monkeys, while taking care of Eoin on the edge of Dublin, when we passed an elementary school one afternoon and went in. The doors were unlocked and the hallways empty and no one around. The two of us wandered into a classroom. On a wall was a poster of a monkey.

The caption said, “Do you know why monkeys can’t talk?” Underneath it said, “Because they are afraid humans will put them to work!” I laughed. We found an exit, walked across an empty playground, down an alley and back to the mean old street.

The Donegal bus rolled past sheep wearing long white coats grazing on miles of green leading to the wild sea, to the edge of the unknown waiting for spring’s shearing, fighting fear receiving disinfectants from laughing, cursing men in black Wellington boots spraying abstract splashes of red paint on white coats indicating they were disease free.

“My antidote is patience, acceptance and trust which is part of the mystery of creativity and creation. My active patient skills allow a strong bond of trust between the ego and creative child,” I whispered to the women.

We rattled around curves, passing stoned fields lying fallow, cold, hard soil where generations dug potatoes before they starved or escaped famines in 1840 sailing toward England or Boston with a few scarce pence in ragged pockets dreaming of better futures trying to stay alive long enough to begin to forget to remember those who didn’t make it and wouldn’t make it.

They ate grass crawling miles finding nothing remembering all the harvests sitting in English warehouses stolen by absentee landlords. Fat British rats ate corn and wheat, and those who managed to scrape enough together got off the island as best they could from Cork or Belfast or Galway, in thick rolling seas with no idea, absolutely no way of knowing, when or where they would finally land, holding a foreign address scrawled on a scrap of paper if they had the luck of the Irish; telling, sharing gentle histories, legends, myths, fabrications and stories to their children through generations easing hunger, memory, remembering everything and as we rolled along I knew it was still hard and not much easier now even with money coming back from across the water knowing the women might never see their children again, for their sons and daughters had left the soil, sky and water on their diaspora, became wild geese and it was all a metaphor in my mind’s restless eye.

“I sing,” I shouted toward land’s end where water smashed rocks, “Long live the creative child!”

“Oh, I see,” one matriarch said. “I like the God part. Don’t you, Mary?” she said, gesturing to her friend who was in a state of shock.

“To be sure, to be sure,” Mary said. And they let it go.

“Yes,” I agreed, pulling a mirror out of my pocket, wrapped in brown and red gringsing. It was long enough to be a scarf, very thin in places with frayed threads. It had a rough coarse texture, smelling of jungle, vats of water and wood ash.

“This is a magic cloth from Bali. It is woven in a process called ikat. The word ikat means to tie or bind and protects this talisman I carry with me as I travel inner and outer worlds. This mirror was a gift from a woman down in Dublin. It manifests Beauty. The universe gives us what we need whether or not we know we need it.”

I turned the mirror toward them. The women looked into gleaming glass. They saw their past, present and future lives all rolled into one powerful flash of light. It was a vision reflecting their joy, sadness, regrets, hope, charity, wisdom and love. The looking glass showed them their birth, middle age and death.

They saw An Gort a Mor, the great hunger and sat back sucking air.

Carrigart was the edge of their world.

“I see,” Mary said, looking up and straight into my blue eyes. They reminded her of a snow leopard, a wild, sharply focused nocturnal predator comfortable at higher elevations existing in an independent, solitary way.

“Then,” I said smiling, pointing to the red machine on the seat, “I download the images into this,” sliding the talisman mirror into my pocket.

“Of course, it’s a manual. They don’t make them like that anymore. Better than staring at a small screen full of radioactive electrons and clicking on a mouse.”

“I should say not,” Mary said. She preferred lead sharpened to a point.

I was trapped on an endless ride to the edge of my life. More questions. Where was I from, what’s America like, why did I leave the land of milk and honey as locals so well put it. On and on. Was I married? No. Did I miss my family?

“No, not really. My grandfather, named Malarkey, immigrated from Sligo during the famine, married Hanna Haley in St. Louis, ended up in Colorado Springs where my folks were born and my rudimentary research at Dublin Castle indicated genealogical records burned in a Sligo church fire years back.”

So much for hard circular factual data.

“My family, while emotionally cold, distant and abusive yet well-intentioned, kind and loving were rather dysfunctional, trying to understand my vagabond spirit nature. They had no choice in the matter and by now they’re used to receiving strange word-strings full of mysterious symbolism and tragic truths from diverse twilight zones. I transmit between crystals and gringsing decorated with universal binary codes.”

“Really now?” said Mary.

“Yes, I gave my folks a world map for their anniversary. They loved it, inviting friends, neighbors and strangers over for trivia games using postmarks, stamps, decals, flotsam, thread, needles, bark, cactus fiber, beads, charts of tributaries, topographical maps, animal skins, hieroglyphics, and Tibetan prayer wheels with Sanskrit characters.

“They caressed burned broken shards of Turkish pottery, Chinese bamboo brushes dripping blood, torn out pages from esoteric Runes, Paleolithic fertility symbols, vitreous unusual writing, and one of my favorites, a Quetzalcoatl image full of written narration based on the oral performances of Central American myths.

“Fascinating,” said Deirdre.

“Yes, I gave them Olmec nahuales shamans containing animal powers dating back to 1200 B.C. speaking their wisdom. They blended the spirituality and intellect of man with the ferocity and strength of the Jaguar to create their nahuales. Their soul required an animal medium to travel from the earth to the heavens and into the underworld.

“Additional cultural reminders were beautiful blank black mirrors. Some displayed faces, others contained scripts written backwards with stories of people, geographies, forbidden objects, and a box called Pandora.

“This was one of their favorite things. They never knew, from one exploration to the next, what they’d find in the box I sent them from the journey. One realization they experienced with Pandora was how they behaved differently, listened more, spoke less, almost as if they were communicating via telepathy or kinesthetic dimensions, within the exotic flow of spirit energies bathing them in a crystal light. They slowed down.

“Yes, they didn’t know what to make of it whenever something mysterious, fascinating, and totally intriguing reached them from General Delivery far away from their daily existence working to pay for a house mortgage, car, food, terrorism insurance and child care.

“You don’t say,” said Mary.

“Oh my yes. They were very busy paying for old age retirement mutual fund investments, 401K plans, nursing home deposits, energy supplies, basic utilities, telephones, cable service and clothing. They were busy buying firewood, utensils, making down payments on memorial cemetery plots up at Olivet, contraceptives, gardening supplies, and various used useful tools on clearance at Goodwill and Thrift stores to make ends meet. They pleaded for some rational, scientific explanation trying to understand what a diamond and thread had in common.”

He’d lost the dear ladies.

I changed the subject and mentioned Leonardo Da Vinci. “He wrote backwards on glass to eliminate thieves and kings from stealing his ideas. He was persecuted for his beliefs. Being left handed, his writing is called mirror writing so it wouldn’t smudge. It’s an art to write in the reverse direction. Writing is directly connected to the heart.”

“Aye,” Deirdre said, crossing herself. “Such a hard life.”

They understood this concept and blessed themselves.

“Mother Mary,” one said, imagining snakes supporting turtles and elephants in gardens full of tempting fruit and rapacious Sermons on the Mount of Venus. Visions of angels danced in her head like sugar plum Irish fairies near Catholic confessionals full of hard wired guilt at that, remorse, and abject self pity.

“Yes,” I suggested, “It’s about gratitude, forgiveness, and abundance.”

I found the courage to inform the highly inquisitive women I am/was/will be a fili - a poet - which explained everything they’d ever need to know, care to know or dream of knowing in their own unique dying tongue. Muttering between themselves in Gaelic they didn’t assault me with any more questions.

I knew the value of not talking the material out. I'd learned that lesson the hard way. I’d realized the inherent magic power of spoken tongues, how stories became distilled through the telling, how they became shape shifters. How they manifested new winged flight. How they lost their magic through the telling.

I knew Omar would murder more of his darlings through the unfolding process. They’d be sentenced.

The bus passed two gravediggers turning soil high on purple heather hills. Digging as a metaphor for poetry.

Pat dropped Mary and Deirdre off near stony paths lined with moss leading to small isolated whitewashed homes tucked into seaside bluffs next to verdant green hills full of grazing sheep on rocky outcrops winding through winter fields at the edge of the Atlantic.

“Slan go foill,” I sang, bidding them fare-thee-well. They waved in amazement hearing my perfect Gaelic accent float into perpetual rain on a soft day. The sky was crying.

“Mind yourself. God Bless.”

They walked home on a narrow path in a hard simple life of blessings. Blessings in the small things they treasured, small ways they stayed connected to the ground, intimate rocky soil, nurturing their children, supporting their husbands through difficult economic times, waiting for their arrival from the sea or fields from the night of their desire and longing, from the edge of their darkness; crying farewell to immigrants, welcoming children now approaching middle age with their wives, husbands, grandchildren from far flung journeys to a world’s end, living in bright lights, big cities with unpronounceable names, sailing past a lighthouse spinning incandescent beams, dancing in lonely isolated whitewashed Donegal community centers hanging on the edge of the sea surrounded by laughter, hearing men and women gossip, playing tin whistles, pipes and reed instruments of eternal sadness and gaiety as seasons spun their magic past worn callused fingers breaking hard brown blocks of tea crumbling fragments into boiling water, pouring their lives into chipped delicate cups, genuflecting and blessing their faith on Sundays hearing sermons about redemption, hope, promise and charity.

They lived good simple uncomplicated lessons in determinism and survival versus free will, facing tests of spiritual blessings, cherishing the testing of their spirit on their looms spinning flax, treadles providing a gentle musical rhythm with shelter, solace, a place of gathering making it happen in their lives. 

A Century is Nothing