A Skull Miscellany (2)

Happy St. Oran’s Eve, patron saint of Halloween! Time here to celebrate his bones which relic in our own stone bone, basalt cave of beginings, shore of shattered cliffs, dragon back of wild Upffington, henge of every stiffie shaken at the sky, Eros and Thanatos coiled round his head stone, floor and door, dark fire haloing every harvest moon.

Yes, celebrate ... go trickertreating, exhume Yorkick monstrous jest, shoe the dragon and saddle Leviathan, roger and romp and jolly rumpus this pale imitative world: A bit of banshee shriek and trooping Sidhe, singing Oran’s birthday song!


***

HALLOWEEN

1996


The jack-o-lanterns glow on porches down the street
with flickering grins of flame: burning on this night
the ancient ruse of fancied horror. On TV the rictus
legion of slashers and vampires sleuth their victims
smooth and caressingly as the blood silk lining
of a cape. It's for the kids, we say, stocking

our plastic pumpkin with candy to the brim:
but we'll eat all the kids don't, and scare ourselves most: It's our treat.
Such pleasures still haunt this creaky boneyard night.
Alas for those poor Christians, who sulk the sidelines
decrying all this as Satan's dance, or stage their own
haunted houses as a bit of real hell. Tape recorded moans

of the unconfessed dead crowd the dark front room, where
a carpet salesman cloaked as a demon tries to scare
pimply pubescents into the folds of the Everlasting Hope Church.
The kids are willing victims, the easiest marks for a lurch.
He leads them through ever darker chambers of sin:
he sighs for the blackened soul of an AIDS victim

dying of alternative lifestyle; gloats over the wet plop
of an aborted fetus in a butcher's room (would have grown up
to be a preacher, he jeers); applauds the twisted carnage
of a drunk driver's dance with a wall. Finally, in the darkest
deepest reddest room that reeks of smoking limburger, mark
how all seems lost -- but then the lights come up

and a janitor dressed as sweet Jesus appears to all, to cup
salvation over all who kneel. Salvation from what, I wonder,
as I look out this window at some kids racing in sugar thunder
up to our house, and pray that the mute misery of our jack
-o-lantern spread crooked and lavish its flaming rack
of teeth: trick us or treat us, but let the night squeal,

and good heavens please spare us from the jaws of the real.




THE UFFINGTON HORSE

2003

The locals say I am the beast
St. George slew, his white sword nailing
The heart of this hill. Well, time weaves
Tales around the hearts of men, but
I am no altar to the need
To kill the winged insides of
Every kiss. Recall how kings of
Old were taken up the hill to
Mount a pure white mare, his flesh in
Hers turned sceptre beneath the white
Applause of stars. I Rhiannon
Ride this high ground like the crest of
The ninth wave. My saddle is a
High hard throne -- mount me, if you dare.
Plunge your song in salt everywhere.





BONING THE GHOUL

2002

An appalling sweetness
slipped into view
when I lost the last
wet curvature of you:

Well, “lost” is landfill
for all tossed verbs,
numens of that last kiss
trucked from dead suburbs.

Atop that dread mound
an eerie twattage glows
as ghoul cockage choirs
in solemn, bony rows.

That chorus sings to me
the beat-to-hell old news
that I’ll not find her again
not even in rear views.

Who knows why forsaking
me was for her so easy,
why she drained the glass;
Or why her sleazy

voidings like a vacuum
in me yet clench,
a vertigo in all makings
with a familiar stench,

deigned to rule a wold
of cold and moony nights
with thorn plecturings of
strings no longer white,

their amperage sucked dry.
What’s horniness if it
douses not in fire
but bone-dry recit,

unbuttoning not blouses
but stone lips of banshee
rue—burning wicker men
because some dame decreed

my hands anon away?
Who wants to fornicate
unnippled sprites of ire?
Let’s banish hope, excoriate

the lust: debone the ghoul
who haunts the ossuary
of every stiffie lost:
let’s remit the actuary

before tits up it tanks.
She rose up from a wave
of breaking blue joy;
and then without a wave

she disappeared, willing me
this stale and sour undertow.
I’ll not find her on this
beach again: It’s time go:

Time to rearrange
into less salty, surer show:
time for bright diurnals
where fresher boners grow

beneath the fertile loam
of an untroubled sleep.
I’ll plunge on alone now
on waters twice as deep,

ghost-captain of a boat
destined for dryer shores,
calmer nights, no matter
how she always gores.





My recent reading of Erich Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousnes found a booming welcome to something that was slowly coming to my awareness. Makes sense than when humans were less conscious, the dark was a much greater feared presence. All that old moon magick and superstition and rituals of exorcism: the conscious flame was a flickering one indeed. But now, seems like we can’t shut the big light off, it just whirls around and around and around, like a lighthouse beacon, nailing everything in its gaze. We are conscious to a fault, light is the new abyss, our synapses jammed in the “on” position.

So when I try to get at the dark sides of things, I don’t mean I’m playing with evil or invoking dread states, but rather that the compensation of this day has to work the other way, flow back towards the heart (as you suggested early on). A conscious dimming, perhaps. With such heightened abilities of the conscious mind (I may be massively fooling myself here), we should be able to return to those dark origins not out of fear but with a sense of trying to partner with the preconscious and preterconscious mind, the instinctual animal who is also our greater angel. (Remember Merlin was the child of the union of a hairy imp and wondrous maid).

Is there a way to ride the sexual as a sort of sea-horse or dragon of great power, turning its infernal procreative appetite toward creative production? Are we growed up enough to risk stepping on for such a ride? I suspect that energy runs like a ley-line back to the Fisher King’s castle, runs right under him, back to the room in which the Grail is keptl, under the terribly old figure who sleeps there — all retired gods, perhaps — back through the other rooms, neolithic and paleolithic, Neanderthal, all of the simian figures, all of the warm-blooded familiars, thence back to the cold-blooded ones, vertebrates, invertebrates, hundreds of millions of years, back through organic to the inorganic, the dominion of stone, of star. What a wild ride that dark energy provides, as long as we understand that we can never master it, never own it, never put it to selfish uses — all of those foibles of the Errant Knight who forgets the difference between Noble and Gluttonous Heart.

Thanatos, perhaps teaches Eros that difference ...






THE DEAD

Eugenio Montale
transl. Jonathan Galassi

The sea that founders on the other shore
sends up a cloud that foams until
the flats reabsorb it. There one day
onto the iron coast we heaved
our hope, more frantic than the ocean
-- and the barren abyss turns green as in the days
that saw us aong the living.

Now the north wind has calmed the muddied knot
of brackish currents and rerouted them
to where they started, someone hangs out nets
on the pruned branches --
faded nets that trail
onto the path that sinks from sight
and dry in the late, cold
torch of the light; and over them
the dense blue crystal blinks
and plunges to a curve of flayed
horizon.

More than seaweed sucked
into the seething being revealed to us, our life
is rousing from such torpor;
the part of us that stalled one day
resigned to limits, rages; the heart flails
in the lines binding one branch
to another, like the water hen
bagged in the meshes;
and a cold deadlock holds us
static and drifting .

So too, perhaps
the dead are denied all rest in the soil:
a power more ruthless than life itself
pulls them away and, all around,
drives them to these beaches,
shades gnawed by human memory,
breaths without body or voice
expelled from the dark;
and their broken flights,
still barely shorn from us, gaze up
and in the sieve of the sea they drown ...




There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and potters’ fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnamulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.

-- Melville, Moby Dick

***

Very early in Irish tradition a story already existed about the resuscitation of a dead giant which contained the following elements:

1. The saints and his companions come across a grave of extraordinary size, or ... the head of a dead person.

2. The saint's companions utter the wish for the buried person to be alive, either because they are eager to meet such a huge person, or because he may be able to tell them about things from times gone by, or about "the invisible things."

3. The saint resuscitates the dead man or head.

4. The resuscitated person proves to be a giant or heathen.

5. He tells them that he suffers in hell, about the torments of hell, or about the place where he lives in hell.

6. He tells the story of his life and ancestry.

7. He is offered baptism, or begs to be baptised, in order not to have to return to hell. He is baptized, dies, and is buried again.

- Clara Strijbosch, "The Heathen Giant in the Voyage of St. Brendan" Celtica 23, 1999, p. 391


GHOULPLAST

March 2004

I found a skull in the
back yard, on the front
seat of a rusted-out
car sitting on blocks.
I once owned it, the
skull I mean, well
the car too, I wore
both out on the merry
marauding road of
guitars and bars
and tits in jars on
too-high shelves. I
found it there, the
skull I mean, while
I was looking for
another poem, rummaging
through fallen oak
leaves for a broken
snake, I mean its
tail cut off, chewed
off probably by one
of the cats. I’d found
it out there Saturday
as I worked in the
yard raking and mowing
on a hosanna of a
spring morning. Poor
snake, it was still
alive, crawling away
from my rake as I
probed the tiny grey
thing that was bigger
than a worm, almost
as round as the
buried cock of this
poem. I let it go
just then, reminding
myself to write a
poem about it when
I settled back here
in the court of
excavations
exhumations
& starry ululation.
So today I went
looking for that snake
in the back yard, on
this page I mean,
uncovering not a
half-chewed still-
plumbing umbilicus
to chthonic hoohah
but woeful relics
of a wild bad time
I though were well
buried, sobered up,
the major archons
of those nocturnal
motions bound at
the wing and tossed
down into this
purgatory of words.
I held my old skull
in my hands like
Hamlet graveside
of Ophelia his old
pal Yorick’s jester skull,
the noggin huge as
a Neanderthal, perhaps
as old too. He I
brooding on old
merriment, old loves,
old thrall. Gone.
I half-expected
that half-snake to
pounce up at me
from a black eyehole,
at least sigh within,
hiss. Nada. Instead
the wind cranked
up from offstage hands
to moan and whistle
through that rusted-
out ‘76 Datsun 710
I pushed to the side
of the road maybe
18 years ago,
giving up that bar-
car filled with
cigarette butts and
blackouts for good.
One night I fucked
a hot rock chick
in that now splayed
and ripped back seat,
my 6 foot 3 frame
somehow compressed
to four as I boiled
sperm in her thrusting
shouting beach-white
loins. Some scent
of her sex coiled
in the orange blossom-
fume sailing on breeze,
corrupt as booze
and twice as fragrant.
Gone, perhaps, or
soured into that
awfuller smell of
the 1000 other nights
I didn’t score the
hot rock chick,
the sweat and the
futile frenzy of
desire’s crucifix with
its immortally
immoral nails oozing
a pustulent nacre,
that awful smell
from when I crapped
my pants in a blackout
one night when some
of the bartenders at
the Station tried to
push my car up out
of the bushes behind
the bar. Soured in
graverot: almost gone.
I asked my hand, just what
do I do now? Preach
my gospel of blue
motions til the brutes
receive communion
and settle on back
down to dark-as-
sweet-oblivion ground?
I wish I could, but
I don't know words
blue enough to bless
the dead. Instead, I
call on Prosper’s shade
from the hour when
his tempest stilled --
fatherly at last of
foul Caliban when he
said, “this thing of darkness
I call my own.” Indeed.
And so I put lips to bone
and battered steel
and call their evening
home. Somewhere in
the leaves beneath the
oak, just beyond the
borders of our yard,
I hear a snaky shake and
coil, reminding me
to write of him another
day, to let my ghoulplast
hold the rake and
do some honest work.
Maybe then you’ll find
proper burial at last,
salt my seas but good
and buouy that dolphin
boy who guides my hand
along every graveside
stone along this Road
of Blue-Boned souls.




The Life of Colum Cille (Columba), written in Irish by Manus O'Donnell and written in 1532, contains the following episode:

"Once when Colum Cille was walking beside the river Boyne a human skull was brought to him. The size of the skull was much bigger than the skulls of the people of that time. Then his followers said to Colum Cille, "It is a pity we don't know whose skull this is, or the whereabouts of the soul that was in the body on which it was." Colum Cille answered, "I'm not leaving this place until I find this out from God for you."

"Then Colum Cille prayed earnestly to God for that to be revealed to him, and God heard that prayer so that the skull itself spoke to him. It said that it was the skull of Cormac mac Airt, son of Conn of the Hundred Battles, king of Ireland, and an ancester to himself, for Colum Cille was tenth generation after Cormac. And the skull said that although his faith wasn't perfect, he had a certain amount of faith and, because of his keeping the truth and that as God knew that from his descendants would come Colum Cille who would pray for his soul, He had not damned him permanently, although it was in severe pain that he awaited these prayers.

"Then Colum Cillle picked up the skull and washed it honorably, and baptized and blessed it; then he buried it. And Colum Cille did not leave that place until he had said 30 masses for the soul of Cormac. And at the last of the masses, the angels of God appeared to Colum Cille, taking Cormac's soul with them to enjoy eternal glory through the prayers of Colum Cille."

- O'Donnell, The Life of Colum Cillle, transl. B. Lacey, Dublin 1998

***


BIG SKULL

2002

There’s a big skull
in our back yard
satirizing the half
we vaunt as day.

I hear it droning
low old chants
& alms, sad &
deep within its

chapel bone, cold
as time and all
that drained away
while we built and

taught and moved
zand won. Our way
is powerful and
ripe, it’s true—a red

engine of high
rhythms, fleet
furious and blind.
It arcs a future

which has no need
of you and me;
it has cured itself
of the ache to love.

La la la, sings the skull
out back, not exactly
mocking, nor ironic,
but deeply disturbing

as all engraved
jesters are. He’s
exactly what we
cannot stand to hear:

correction from
down under,
God’s thunder
bringing up the rear.


From Jung’s Sermons to the Dead, IV:

The dead filled the place murmuring and said;
Tell us of gods and devils, accursed one!
The god-suun is the highest good, the devil its opposite.
Thus have ye two gods. But there are many high and good things
and many great evils. Among these are two god-devils; the one is the
Burning One , the other the Growing One.
The burning one is EROS, who hath the form of flame.
Flame giveth light because it consumeth.
The growing one is the TREE OF LIFE.. It buddeth,
as in growing it heapeth up living stuff.
Eros flameth up and dieth. But the tree of life groweth with slow
and constant increase through unmeasured time.
Good and evil are united in the flame.
Good and evil are united in the increase of the tree. In their divinity
stand life and love opposed.
Innumerable as the host of the stars is the number of gods and devils.
Each star is a god, and each space that a star filleth is a devil.
But the empty-fullness of the whole is the pleroma.
The operation of the whole is Abraxas, to whom only the
ineffective standeth opposed.
Four is the number of the principal gods, as four is the
number of the world`s measurements.
One is the beginning, the god-sun.
Two is Eros; for he bindeth twain together and outspreadeth himself
in brightness.
Three is the Tree of Life, for it filleth space with bodily forms.
Four is the devil, for he openeth all that is closed ...


SKULL O’ BLOOD

2003

O for a well-bucket
of living memory—
a rich, steaming
cup of blood
fresh as the night
I spilled it carousing
my way home
out of the usual
complications of
self and selfish
oblivions—

Blood in the
savagery of raw
nakedness when
my hand reached
clasped her breast
like the harbor
of a lost island—

Blood in cupping
squeezing &
nipple-pinching the
reality confined there,
getting past all
the staves and punji
sticks which provoke
and fend desire
(lonely, drunk,
shy, broke, speechless)—

Blood in breaching
the self’s prison walls
for a night on a
mermaid shore
misted with the
sea’s own noctilucent
billows.

I recall being 14
on a moonlit night
& sitting on a
parked motorbike
behind a neighborhood
girl & touching
a breast for the first time:

The wander up
under her t-shirt
with trembling hands
under bracups and
then boy-manning
that gelid flesh,
meeting no
resistance for a while:

scared shitless with
both hands on
her breasts while
she sat still and
patient for 30
seconds in that
moonlight til’,

deeming me milked,
shifted away off the
bike & leaving me
there trembling
and united with
those darker lower
regions I carried
like a a lake of
eternal joy:

Oooh rich skull
of my own blood,
bubbling for the
first time &
forever ripe
in the undying flavor
of desire and
fear and daring
which I suckled with
greedy teeth. Dip
your pen in that cup
if you dare, if
you still can, if
you can take
me back there
to stain my lips
with that greedy
hot & lost pulp.

DEMON IN THE WALL

2002

Engraved upon a basement
wall is a devil trapped in rope.
That’s how all churches, hooch-
stills, and marriages begin:
A raw, primordial age
when equal forces saw:
the good which would begin,
a dark which backwards falls.

There is a time when
principalities roar, the balance
terrible, a back-and-forth
over sweet prefecture and ruin;
the mouth which chants
the ululant vowel is also
filled with teeth, filed
to a glittering “T.”

There was a time not long ago
when love and its shade were split;
and on that tortured ground
all decency was spilt, sacrificed,
perhaps, so a carnal
knowing could evolve
from rough magic on to rue,
allowing it a dark enough depth
so I could know for sure
what going home meant.

A boy-man’s down there with
a snake gripped in his teeth;
I’m better off engraving him
lest sleep unloose the rope
and black wings again soar.


THE NEXT PASSION

March 2004


Journalists of soul,
please note: This week
“The Living Dead,” a
re-make of George
Romero’s ghoul opera,
has knocked Mel Gibson’s
“The Passion” from
the top of the box
office chart. Apparently
we eat our dead with
steadfast glee, and
don’t require a cross
nailed so to glut on
eviscerations of
the apparitional Sidhe:
Perhaps the thrall
parallels from viewing
chair to chair, the muse
of worst ends endless
in her gory repartee
onscreen or page or
down the stony circles
where our imagination
yet fumes. How ripe
she dances up there
on the screen, peeling
off her fancies behind
the next victim’s throat-
split scream. Something
of that horror is too
revenant to simply
die away: it keeps
on knocking at the
doors and window
of our age, polite for
now but persistent,
as thirsty for our blood
as we are for recalling
theirs. Counter-Janus,
the faces stare each
other down at this
threshold., imploring,
aroused, even greedy,
the appetites of life
and death far more
dangerous than “vital”
or “needy.” Here’s a
table that we keep
returning too until
we’ve “supped full
well with horrors,”
like Shakespeare’s
bloody knight, holding
court onscreen in
a blue-to-black Hell
Castle reflected from
our darker soul’s
incessant gleam,
devouring for two
hours and twenty two
minutes a persistent
love-sick night.
Black hooves indeed
hammer all the nails
securely in. It’s what
that God requests
on His on way back to Eden--
the next passionate
eviscerating sigh.





AZTEC KISS

2004

A relic of the Aztec
empire’s throne of blood
is on display now at
the Guggenheim — a skull
mask: Back half removed,
eyes fashioned from white
disks with huge black
balls for pupils and —
here’s the cruellest
part part — long
flint knives for nose
and tongue: Those
blades reveal that
age’s eyes were
insatiable for that
red syrup of the
heart: Thier great
gods thirsted
for it like drunks
their hooch:
They also spell
the spillage of
that age, for blood
that is priests
and kings in
gold sunlight
slipped and fell
hard on, all the way
down their pyramids
to doom: Ghastly for
sure but the mask
is vivid, wildly florid,
brilliant at the altar
of that devastating
sun: Knives for certain
are for noon, that sharp
stilled hour when lust
and greed shriek like
the sun-horse’s balls
and the distance between
serrated blade and
pulsing terrified heart
is but one tock
of plunge: Far indeed
such vicious tropes
from those we worship
in this age: Thank
God that sharp
relic’s glow is deep
in a museum’s vault:
Yet not so far perhaps
if that image still clicks
like a switchblade into
sudden truth, those
sensory blades leaping off
the page and all the way
to here: That skull mask
is always trooping through
the day with wide dead
eyes alert as Doom for
the next exposed pulse—
openings in traffic,
a sale ripe for the
plundering in a caller’s
wavering voice: Pangs
of hunger lifting in my
mind the top from
a microwaved tub of
Cuban rice and
beans and chunks of
pork awash in tomatoes
and cilantro: The steely
rage I feel when
I hear our reelected
bubbleboy of a President
on the radio when he
says the word mandate:
When movement in
the corner of my eye
sharpens as I look out
my window at work
into a pretty girl jogging
by, sweaty cleavage and
thumping butt is
suddenly speared by
a bolt of lust that
flings tipped with
that blade, pinning
her against a wall
& tearing shorts
& panties down and
thrusting balls to walls
that skull mask’s pierce
of all the world’s fishes
leaping there: Inside this
nice guy who’s near 50
who writes and rides
toward Love there’s
just below a demon rider
with brash obsidian
snout and tongue of
adder’s fire: The cold
front now slicing
down the state belongs
to him: So I suspect
do your eyes, my blue
Fomorian, and all
that ripens in your
bustier of ice: Every
beloved hoods a knife
inside her sighs which
will not settle for
anything less than the
real mortal bloody
beating deal till death’s
black wombage swells
past full: Every poem
has the slosh and pour
and is lyric as the moon
but understand there’s
a darker porpoise snout
below, chipped and
whetted long ago
to kiss every shore
and keep plunging
through, from well-
hung tongue to
hell’s own bung,
nailing and cleaving
the heart of every
next ripe heart of song.


ENTER THE DRAGON

2005

The Dark -- felt beautiful.

-- Emily Dickinson (Fr. 627)

Beware the scented bed of
Love: it rides upon the
dragon’s back who swims
abyssal realms. Drowse
there and you’ll wake
a molted man of fire,
enrapt inside the rupture
of the devil of deep
welcome. Your wings
will lift you into nights
the size of titan ire,
your eyes whet and keen
for any trace of blue
embroilment to fall,
silklike, from yet
knowable breasts
ripe and leaking
dragon’s milk, booze
poured from paps
of doom. Ride such
nights at your peril,
son of ancient smiles:
Do not presume you
have tooth or troth
sufficient for that dark
demanding angel ride
into the chasm which
splits the fundaments.
Just hold on for your
immortal soul
and let heavens collide
and smash down
every shore. Let every
numen reveal the bestial
depths below, like buoys
singing on blackened tides,
rippled by deep waves
fanning deeper lands
than undreamt Love can go.


When Pryderi returned ((to Dyfed)) he and Manawydan feasted and took their ease. They began the feast at Arberth, since that was the chief court where every celebration began, and after the evening’s first sitting, while the servants were eating, the four companions arose and went to Gorsedd Arberth ((a fairy mound)), taking company with them. As they were sitting on the mound they heard thunder, and with the loudness of the thunder a mist fell, so that no one could see his companions. When the mist lifted it was bright everywhere, and when they looked out at where they had once seen their flocks and herds and dwellings they now saw nothing, no animal, no smoke, no fire, no man, no dwelling — only the houses of the court empty, deserted, uninhabited, without man or beast in them; their own company was lost too, and they understood that only the four of them alone remained.

— “Manawydan son of Llyr,” from The Mabinogion, transl. Jeffrey Gantz


TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE HARVEST MOON

St. Oran’s Day 2004

Last night the harvest moon
burnt full inside a total eclipse,
as if Saint Oran himself
bore on his feast night
the earth’s voyaging shade.
His boat indeed is dark
inside that pure silver,
mined from every
shores he searches within.
When I woke that harrowing
was over & the moon burnt
high above the west,
a white skull turning the
sky into wild milk, so hot
with noctilucence that it
almost hurt to stare.
Reliquary of the sea’s old
song, vox organum belling
high the narhwals’ choir,
crown for us what sails
our deepest soul, isle for isle
through all loves, all lives:
you are the music inside
the tomb, the man who
sings inside each collapsing
wave’s long boom. Moon
which wombs no-time,
toll that sea-torn note which by
rising and falling all tides
and songs and bell towers thrive.

A Whale of A Ghost Story

A most excellent ghost-story, mixing the vulgar vigours of youth with the terrifying doors it invokes -- ah read this story with dark eyes, and you’ll see the dark vitality which bursts from underground ...


TEIG O'KANE (TADHG O CÁTHÁN) AND THE CORPSE

From Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, edited and selected by W. B. Yeats (1888)

Literally translated from the Irish by Douglas Hyde

[I FOUND it hard to place Mr. Douglas Hyde's magnificent story. Among the ghosts or the fairies? It is among the fairies on the grounds that all these ghosts and bodies were in no manner ghosts and bodies, but pishogues--fairy spells. One often hears of these visions of Ireland. I have met a man who had lived a wild life like the man in the story, till a vision came to him in County ------ one dark night--in no way so terrible a vision as this, but sufficient to change his whole character. He will not go out at night. If you speak to him suddenly he trembles. He has grown timid and strange. He went to the bishop and was sprinkled with holy water. "It may have come as a warning," said the bishop; "yet great theologians are of opinion that no man ever saw an apparition, for no man would survive it."--ED.]

***

There was once a grown-up lad in the County Leitrim, and he was strong and lively, and the son of a rich farmer. His father had plenty of money, and he did not spare it on the son. Accordingly, when the boy grew up he liked sport better than work, and, as his father had no other children, he loved this one so much that he allowed him to do in everything just as it pleased himself. He was very extravagant, and he used to scatter the gold money as another person would scatter the white. He was seldom to be found at home, but if there was a fair, or a race, or a gathering within ten miles of him, you were dead certain to find him there. And he seldom spent a night in his father's house, but he used to be always out rambling, and, like Shawn Bwee long ago, there was

"grádh gach cailin i mbrollach a léine," "the love of every girl in the breast of his shirt", and it's many's the kiss he got and he gave, for he was very handsome, and there wasn't a girl in the country but would fall in love with him, only for him to fasten his two eyes on her, and it was for that someone made this rann on him--

"Feuch an rigaire 'g iarraidh poige,
Ni h-iongantas mor e a bheith mar ata
Ag leanamhaint a gcómhnuidhe d'arnan na graineoige
Anuas 's anios's nna chodladh 'sa' la."

i.e.--

"Look at the rogue, its for kisses he's rambling,
It isn't much wonder, for that was his way;
He's like an old hedgehog, at night he'll be scrambling
From this place to that, but he'll sleep in the day."

At last he became very wild and unruly. He wasn't to be seen day nor night in his father's house, but always rambling or going on his kailee (night-visit) from place to place and from house to house, so that the old people used to shake their heads and say to one another, "it's easy seen what will happen to the land when the old man dies; his son will run through it in a year, and it won't stand him that long itself".

He used to be always gambling and card-playing and drinking, but his father never minded his bad habits, and never punished him. But it happened one day that the old man was told that the son had ruined the character of a girl in the neighbourhood, and he was greatly angry, and he called the son to him, and said to him, quietly and sensibly--"Avic," says he, "you know I loved you greatly up to this, and I never stopped you from doing your choice thing whatever it was, and I kept plenty of money with you, and I always hoped to leave you the house and land, and all I had after myself would be gone; but I heard a story of you today that has disgusted me with you. I cannot tell you the grief that I felt when I heard such a thing of you, and I tell you now plainly that unless you marry that girl I'll leave house and land and everything to my brother's son. I never could leave it to anyone who would make so bad a use of it as you do yourself, deceiving women and coaxing girls. Settle with yourself now whether you'll marry that girl and get my land as a fortune with her, or refuse to marry her and give up all that was coming to you; and tell me in the morning which of the two things you have chosen."

"Och! Domnoo Sheery! father, you wouldn't say that to me, and I such a good son as I am. Who told you I wouldn't marry the girl?" says he.

But his father was gone, and the lad knew well enough that he would keep his word too; and he was greatly troubled in his mind, for as quiet and as kind as the father was, he never went back of a word that he had once said, and there wasn't another man in the country who was harder to bend than he was.

The boy did not know rightly what to do. He was in love with the girl indeed, and he hoped to marry her some time or other, but he would much sooner have remained another while as he was, and follow on at his old tricks--drinking, sporting and playing cards; and, along with that, he was angry that his father should order him to marry, and should threaten him if he did not do it.

"Isn't my father a great fool," says he to himself. "I
was ready enough, and only too anxious, to marry Mary; and now since he threatened me, faith I've a great mind to let it go another while."

His mind was so much excited that he remained between two notions as to what he should do. He walked out into the night at last to cool his heated blood, and went on to the road. He lit a pipe, and as the night was fine he walked and walked on, until the quick pace made him begin to forget his trouble. The night was bright, and the moon half full. There was not a breath of wind blowing, and the air was calm and mild. He walked on for nearly three hours, when he suddenly remembered that it was late in the night, and time for him to turn. "Musha! I think I forgot myself," says he; "it must be near twelve o'clock now."

The word was hardly out of his mouth, when he heard the sound of many voices, and the trampling of feet on the road before him. "I don't know who can be out so late at night as this, and m such a lonely road," said he to himself.

He stood listening, and he heard the voices of many people talking through other, but he could not understand what they were saying. "Oh, wirra!" says he, "I'm afraid. It's not Irish or English they have; it can't be they're Frenchmen!" He went on a couple of yards farther, and he saw well enough by the light of the moon a band of little people coming towards him, and they were carrying something big and heavy with them. "Oh, murder!" says he to himself, "sure it can't be that they're the good people that's in it!" Every rib of hair that was on his head stood up, and there fell a shaking on his bones, for he saw that they were coming to him fast.

He looked at them again, and perceived that there wore about twenty little men in it, and there was not a man at all of them higher than about three feet or three feet and a half, and some of them were grey, and seemed very old. He looked again, but he could not make out what was the heavy thing they were carrying until they came up to him, and then they all stood round about him. They threw the heavy thing down on the road, and he saw on the spot that it was a dead body.

He became as cold as the Death, and there was not a drop of blood running in his veins when an old little grey maneen came up to him and said, "Isn't it lucky we met you, Teig O'Kane?"

Poor Teig could not bring out a word at all, nor open his lips, if he were to get the word for it, and so he gave no answer.

"Teig O'Kane," said the little grey man again, "isn't it timely you met us?"

Teig could not answer him.

"Teig O'Kane," says he, "the third time, isn't it lucky and timely that we met you?"

But Teig remained silent, for he was afraid to return an answer, and his tongue was as if it was tied to the roof of his mouth.

The little grey man turned to his companions, and there was joy in his bright little eye. "And now," says he, "Teig O'Kane hasn't a word, we can do with him what we please. Teig, Teig," says he, "you're living a bad life, and we can make a slave of you now, and you cannot withstand us, for there's no use in trying to go against us. Lift that corpse."

Teig was so frightened that he was only able to utter the two wards, "I won't;" for as frightened as he was, he was obstinate and stiff, the same as ever.

"Teig O'Kane won't lift the corpse," said the little maneen, with a wicked little laugh, for all the world like the breaking of a lock or dry kippeens, and with a little harsh voice like the striking of a cracked bell. "Teig O'Kane won't lift the corpse--make him lift it;" and before the word was out of his mouth they had all gathered round poor Teig, and they all talking and laughing through other.

Teig tried to run from them, but they followed him, and a man of them stretched out his foot before him as he ran, so that Teig was thrown in a heap on the road. Then before he could rise up the fairies caught him, some by the hands and some by the feet, and they held him tight, in a way that he could not stir, with his face against the ground. Six or seven of them raised the body then, and pulled it over to him, and left it down on his back. The breast of the corpse was squeezed against Teig's back and shoulders, and the arms of the corpse were thrown around Teig's neck. Then they stood back from him a couple of yards, and let him get up. He rose, foaming at the mouth and cursing, and he shook himself, thinking to throw the corpse off his back. But his fear and his wonder were great when he found that the two arms had a tight hold round his own neck, and that the two legs were squeezing his hips firmly, and that, however strongly he tried, he could not throw it off, any more than a horse can throw off its saddle. He was terribly frightened then, and he thought he was lost. "Ochone! for ever," said he to himself, "it's the bad life I'm leading that has given the good people this power over me. I promise to God and Mary, Peter and Paul, Patrick and Bridget, that I'll mend my ways for as long as I have to live, if I come clear out of this danger--and I'll marry the girl."

The little grey man came up to him again, and said he to him, "Now, Teigeen, says he, you didn't lift the body when I told you to lift it, and see how you were made to lift it; perhaps when I tell you to bury it you won't bury it until you're made to bury it!"

"Anything at all that I can do for your honour," said Teig, "I'll do it," for he was getting sense already, and if it had not been for the great fear that was on him, he never would have let that civil word slip out of his mouth.

The little man laughed a sort of laugh again. "You're getting quiet now, Teig," says he. "I'll go bail but you'll be quiet enough before I'm done with you. Listen to me now, Teig O'Kane, and if you don't obey me in all I'm telling you to do, you'll repent it. You must carry with you this corpse that is on your back to Teampoll-Démus, and you must bring it into the church with you, and make a grave for it in the very middle of the church, and you must raise up the flags and put them down again the very same way, and you must carry the clay out of the church and leave the place as it was when you came, so that no one could know that there had been anything changed. But that's not all. Maybe that the body won't be allowed to be buried in the church; perhaps some other man has the bed, and, if so, it's likely he won't share it with this one. If you don't get leave to bury it in Teampoll-Démus, you must carry it to Carrick-fhad-vic-Orus, and bury it in the churchyard there; and if you don't get it into that place, take it with you to Teampoll-Ronan; and if that churchyard is closed on you, take it to Imlogue-Fada; and if you're not able to bury it there, you've no more to do than to take it to Kill-Breedya, and you can bury it there without hindrance. I cannot tell you what one of those churches is the one where you will have leave to bury that corpse under the clay, but I know that it will be allowed you to bury him at some church or other of them. If you do this work rightly, we will be thankful to you, and you will have no cause to grieve; but if you are slow or lazy, believe me we shall take satisfaction of you."

When the grey little man had done speaking, his comrades laughed and clapped their hands together. "Glic! Glic! Hwee! Hwee!" they all cried; "go on, go on, you have eight hours before you till daybreak, and if you haven't this man buried before the sun rises, you're lost." They struck a fist and a foot behind on him, and drove him on in the road. He was obliged to walk, and to walk fast, for they gave him no rest.

He thought himself that there was not a wet path, or a dirty boreen, or a crooked contrary road in the whole county, that he had not walked that night. The night was at times very dark, and whenever there would come a cloud across the moon he could see nothing, and then he used often to fall. Sometimes he was hurt, and sometimes he escaped, but he was obliged always to rise on the moment and to hurry on. Sometimes the moon would break out clearly, and then he would look behind him and see the little people following his back. And he heard them speaking amongst themselves, talking and crying out, and screaming like a flock of sea-gulls; and if he was to save his soul he never understood as much as one word of what they were saying.

He did not know how far he had walked, when at last one of them cried out to him, "Stop here!" He stood, and they all gathered round him.

"Do you see those withered trees over there?" says the old boy to him again. "Teampoll Demus is among those trees, and you must go in there by yourself, for we cannot follow you or go with you. We must remain here. Go on boldly."

Teig looked from him, and he saw a high wall that was in places half broken down, and an old grey church on the inside of the wall, and about a dozen withered old trees scattered here and there round it. There was neither leaf nor twig on any of them, but their bare crooked branches were stretched out like the arms of an angry man when he threatens. He had no help for it, but was obliged to go forward. He was a couple of hundred yards from the church, but he walked on, and never looked behind him until he came to the gate of the churchyard. The old gate was thrown down, and he had no difficulty in entering. He turned then to see if any of the little people were following him, but there came a cloud over the moon, and the night became so dark that he could see nothing. He went into the churchyard, and he walked up the old grassy pathway leading to the church. When he reached the door, he found it locked. The door was large and strong, and he did not know what to do. At last he drew out his knife with difficulty, and stuck it in the wood to try if it were not rotten, but it was not.

"Now," said he to himself, "I have no more to do; the door is shut, and I can't open it."

Before the words were rightly shaped in his own mind, a voice in his ear said to him, "Search for the key on the top of the door, or on the wall."

He started. "Who is that speaking to me?" he cried, turning round; but he saw no one. The voice said in his ear again, "Search for the key on the top of the door, or on the wall."

"What's that?" said he, and the sweat running from his forehead; "who spoke to me?"

"It's I, the corpse, that spoke to you!" said the voice.

"Can you talk?" said Teig.


"Now and again," said the corpse.

Teig searched for the key, and he found it on the top of the wall. He was too much frightened to say any more, but he opened the door wide, and as quickly as he could, and he went in, with the corpse on his back. It was as dark as pitch inside, and poor Teig began to shake and tremble.

"Light the candle," said the corpse.

Teig put his hand in his pocket, as well as he was able, and drew out a flint and steel. He struck a spark out of it, and lit a burnt rag he had in his pocket. He blew it until it made a flame, and he looked round him. The church was very ancient, and part of the wall was broken down. The windows were blown in or cracked, and the timber of the seats was rotten. There were six or seven old iron candlesticks left there still, and in one of these candlesticks Teig found the stump of an old candle, and he lit it. He was still looking round him on the strange and horrid place in which he found himself, when the cold corpse whispered in his ear, "Bury me now, bury me now; there is a spade and turn the ground." Teig looked from him, and he saw a spade lying beside the altar. He took it up, and he placed the blade under a flag that was in the middle of the aisle, and leaning all his weight on the handle of the spade, he raised it. When the first flag was raised it was not hard to raise the others near it, and he moved three or four of them out of their places. The clay that was under them was soft and easy to dig, but he had not thrown up more than three or four shovelfuls, when he felt the iron touch something soft like flesh. He threw up three or four more shovelfuls from around it, and then he saw that it was another body that was buried in the same place.

'I am afraid I'll never be allowed to bury the two bodies in the same hole," said Teig, in his own mind. "You corpse, there on my back," says he, "will you be satisfied if I bury you down here?" But the corpse never answered him a word.

"That's a good sign," said Teig to himself. "Maybe he's getting quiet," and he thrust the spade down in the earth again. Perhaps he hurt the flesh of the other body, for the dead man that was buried there stood up in the grave, and shouted an awful shout. "Hoo! hoo!! hoo!!! Go! go!! go!!! or you're a dead, dead, dead man!" And then he fell back in the grave again. Teig said afterwards, that of all the wonderful things he saw that night, that was the most awful to him. His hair stood upright on his head like the bristles of a pig, the cold sweat ran off his face, and then came a tremor over all his bones, until he thought that he must fall.

But after a while he became bolder, when he saw that the second corpse remained lying quietly there, and he threw in the clay on it again, and he smoothed it overhead, and he laid down the flags carefully as they had been before. "It can't be that he'll rise up any more," said he.

He went down the aisle a little farther, and drew near to the door, and began raising the flags again, looking for another bed for the corpse on his back. He took up three or four flags and put them aside, and then he dug the clay. He was not long digging until he laid bare an old woman without a thread upon her but her shirt. She was more lively than the first corpse, for he had scarcely taken any of the clay away from about her, when she sat up and began to cry, "Ho, you bodach (clown)! Ha, you bodach! Where has he been that he got no bed?"

Poor Teig drew back, and when she found that she was getting no answer, she closed her eyes gently, lost her vigour and fell back quietly and slowly under the clay. Teig did to her as he had done to the man--he threw the clay back on her, and left the flags down overhead.

He began digging again near the door, but before he had thrown up more than a couple of shovelfuls, he noticed a man's hand laid bare by the spade. "By my soul, I'll go no farther, then," said he to himself; "what use is it for me?" And he threw the clay in again on it, and settled the flags as they had been before.

He left the church then, and his heart was heavy enough, but he shut the door and locked it, and left the key where he found it. He sat down on a tombstone that was near the door, and began thinking. He was in great doubt what he should do. He laid his face between his two hands, and cried for grief and fatigue, since he was dead certain at this time that he never would come home alive. He made another attempt to loosen the hands of the corpse that were squeezed round his neck, but they were as tight as if they were clamped; and the more he tried to loosen them, the tighter they squeezed him. He was going to sit down once more, when the cold, horrid lips of the dead man said to him, "Carrick-fhad-vic-Orus," and he remembered the command of the people to bring the corpse with him to that place if he should be unable to bury it where he had been.

He rose up, and looked about him. "I don't know the way," he said.

As soon as he had uttered the word, the corpse stretched out suddenly its left hand that had been tightened round his neck, and kept it pointing out, showing him the road he ought to follow. Teig went in the direction that the fingers were stretched, and passed out of the churchyard. He found himself on an old rutty, stony road, and he stood stiff again, not knowing where to turn. The corpse stretched out its bony hand a second time, and pointed out to him another road--not the road by which he had come when approaching the old church. Teig followed that road, and whenever he came to a path or road meeting it, the corpse always stretched out its hand and pointed with its fingers, showing him the way he was to take.

Many was the cross-road he turned down, and many was the crooked boreen he walked, until he saw from him an old burying-ground at last, beside the road, but there was neither church nor chapel nor any other building in it. The corpse squeezed him tightly, and he stood. "Bury me, bury me in the burying-ground," said the voice.

Teig drew over towards the old burying-place, and he was not more than about twenty yards from it, when, raising his eyes, he saw hundreds and hundreds of ghosts--men, women, and children--sitting on the top of the wall round about, or standing on the inside of it, or running backwards and forwards, and pointing at him, while he could see their mouths opening and shutting as if they were speaking, though he heard no word, nor any sound amongst them at all.

He was afraid to go forward, so he stood where he was, and the moment he stood, all the ghosts became quiet, and ceased moving. Then Teig understood that it was trying to keep him from going in, that they were. He walked a couple of yards forwards, and immediately the whole crowd rushed together towards the spot to which he was moving, and they stood so thickly together that it seemed to him that he never could break through them, even though he had a mind to try. But he had no mind to try it. He went back broken and dispirited, and when he had gone a couple of hundred yards from the burying-ground, he stood again, for he did not know what way he was to go. He heard the voice of the corpse in his ear, saying "Teampoll-Ronan", and the skinny hand was stretched out again, pointing him out the road.

As tired as he was, he had to walk, and the road was neither short nor even. The night was darker than ever, and it was difficult to make his way. Many was the toss he got, and many a bruise they left on his body. At last he saw Teampoll-Ronan from him in the distance, standing in the middle of the burying-ground. He moved over towards it, and thought he was all right and safe, when he saw no ghosts nor anything else on the wall, and he thought he would never be hindered now from leaving his load off him at last. He moved over to the gate, but as he was passing in, he tripped on the threshold. Before he could recover himself, something that he could not see seized him by the neck, by the hands, and by the feet, and bruised him, and shook him, and choked him, until he was nearly dead; and at last he was lifted up, and carried more than a hundred yards from that place, and then thrown down in an old dyke, with the corpse still clinging to him.

He rose up, bruised and sore, but feared to go near the place again, for he had seen nothing the time he was thrown down and carried away.

"You corpse, up on my back," said he, "shall I go over again to the churchyard?"--but the corpse never answered him. "That's a sign you don't wish me to try it again," said Teig.

He was now in great doubt as to what he ought to do, when the corpse spoke in his ear, and said, "Imlogue-Fada."

"Oh, murder!" said Teig, "must I bring you there? If you keep me long walking like this, I tell you I'll fall under you."

He went on, however, in the direction the corpse pointed out to him. He could not have told, himself, how long he had been going, when the dead man behind suddenly squeezed him, and said, "There!"

Teig looked from him, and he saw a little low wall, that was so broken down in places that it was no wall at all. It was in a great wide field, in from the road; and only for three or four great stones at the comers, that were more like rocks than stones, there was nothing to show that there was either graveyard or burying-ground there.

"Is this Imlogue-Fada? Shall I bury you here?" said Teig.

"Yes," said the voice.

"But I see no grave or gravestone, only this pile of stones," said Teig.

The corpse did not answer, but stretched out its long fleshless hand, to show Teig the direction in which he was to go. Teig went on accordingly, but he was greatly terrified, for he remembered what had happened to him at the last place. He went on, "with his heart in his mouth", as he said himself afterwards; but when he came to within fifteen or twenty yards of the little low square wall, there broke out a flash of lightning, bright yellow and red, with blue streaks in it, and went round about the wall in one course, and it swept by as fast as the swallow in the clouds, and the longer Teig remained looking at it the faster it went, till at last it became like a bright ring of flame round the old graveyard, which no one could pass without being burnt by it. Teig never saw, from the time he was born, and never saw afterwards, so wonderful or so splendid a sight as that was. Round went the flame, white and yellow and blue sparks leaping out from it as it went, and although at first it had been no more than a thin, narrow line, it increased slowly until it was at last a great broad band, and it was continually getting broader and higher, and throwing out more brilliant sparks, till there was never a colour on the ridge of the earth that was not to be seen in that fire; and lightning never shone and flame never flamed that was so shining and so bright as that.

Teig was amazed; he was half dead with fatigue, and he had no courage left to approach the wall. There fell a mist over his eyes, and there came a soorawn in his head, and he was obliged to sit down upon a great stone to recover himself. He could see nothing but the light, and he could hear nothing but the whirr of it as it shot round the paddock faster than a flash of lightning.

As he sat there on the stone, the voice whispered once more in his ear, "Kill-Breedya"; and the dead man squeezed him so tightly that he cried out. He rose again, sick, tired, and trembling, and went forwards as he was directed. The wind was cold, and the road was bad, and the load upon his back was heavy, and the night was dark, and he himself was newly worn out, and if he had had very much farther to go he must have fallen dead under his burden.

At last the corpse stretched out its hand, and said to him, "Bury me there."

"This is the last burying-place," said Teig in his own mind; and the little grey man said I'd be allowed to bury him in some of them, so it must be this; it can't be but they'll lot him in here."

The first faint streak of the ring of day was appearing in the east, and the clouds were beginning to catch fire, but it was darker than ever, for the moon was set, and there were no stars.

"Make haste, make haste!" said the corpse; and Teig hurried forward as well as he could to the graveyard, which was a little place on a bare hill, with only a few graves in it. He walked boldly in through the open gate, and nothing touched him, nor did he either hear or see anything. He came to the middle of the ground, and then stood up and looked round him for a spade or shovel to make a grave. As he was turning round and searching, he suddenly perceived what startled him greatly-a newly-dug grave right before him. He moved over to it, and looked down, and there at the bottom he saw a black coffin. He clambered down into the hole and lifted the lid, and found that (as he thought it would be) the coffin was empty. He had hardly mounted up out of the hole, and was standing on the brink, when the corpse, which had clung to him for more than eight hours, suddenly relaxed its hold of his neck, and loosened its shins from round his hips, and sank down with a plop into the open coffin.

Teig fell down on his two knees at the brink of the grave, and gave thanks to God. He made no delay then, but pressed down the coffin lid in its place, and threw in the clay over it with his two hands; and when the grave was filled up, he stamped and leaped on it with his feet, until it was firm and hard, and then he left the place.

The sun was fast rising as he finished his work, and the first thing he did was to return to the road, and look out for a house to rest himself in. He found an inn at last, and lay down upon a bed there, and slept till night. Then he rose up and ate a little, and fell asleep again till morning. When he awoke in the morning he hired a horse and rode home. He was more than twenty-six miles from home where he was, and he had come all that way with the dead body on his back in one night.

All the people at his own home thought that he must have left the country, and they rejoiced greatly when they saw him come back. Everyone began asking him where he had been, but he would not tell anyone except his father.

He was a changed man from that day. He never drank too much; he never lost his money over cards; and especially he would not take the world and be out late by himself of a dark night.

He was not a fortnight at home until he married Mary, the girl he had been in love with; and it's at their wedding the sport was, and it's he was the happy man from that day forward, and it's all I wish that we may be as happy as he was.

The Soul Cages

O sing your funky matin, my Galahad, son of that philandering blue knight with his peckerwood lance: Play that big night vatic vocalissumus enraged by the roiling sea, huge awfulness just inside behind my every questing sense: Reveal to us the darkness beyond every bright door, the Grail with its appalling blood, more brine than wine, poured from the greater half of heart ...

(Yes but in that darkness there is fear, or my fear of its greatness ... my wife left before 6 a.m. to drive up to Jax with her sister to Mayo Clinic for a second opinion on surgery to remove a huge cyst on one of her ovaries ()that wonderful reproductive plumbing which is the prime turbine of the matriarch, o so afflicted with nature ...) ) ... as I feed Red on the back porch (he with his furry face mashed in the bowl, there’s a faint white fluff further out in the yard, corpse of a big white dove he and Blue killed the other day, assholes, bastards of brute nature ... And as I leave for work myself, out beyond the garden ((littered with many palm fronds fallen from the passover of Wilma)), there’s a big dog running about, sniffing the air, leaping up and then running off into the dark, and I think of our stray cats whom we love to death, just little fellas compared to big dogs like that, those jaws, canines ... And I pray God protect all I love, with that fragile fearful faith of a child in need of protective father; and I pray to that god to grant me courage to face what is and what is to come with great heart and gusto and compassion ... my Grail God and god, front and back faces of a divine thrall, upper and lower ones maybe, I dunno, merging in my dark morning praises of the wild abyss --




BLACK ANGUS

2004

Seal-man sea-ape fixed against the
Tiding light, you rose from brine to
Block the shore where Saint Columba
Walked, cursing the man in rich fine
Gaelic -- a blue-salted brogue heaved
Hard against the flood of high light.
You could not be converted, much
Less shut up; and so the Saint wove
A tale of ancient sin around
Your fish-slick sides, of how you once
Lured a good girl into the tide
And sexed her into the sea-witch
Who buoys every man’s bad dream.
You’d lost her too: But still you laughed
And leapt back in her blackened bath.

Frank MacEowen wells the following rather soaked perspective on the Oran-Columba story in “Odhrain: Patron Saint of the Lower World” -- amen and amen --

“Liminal space is of paramount importance in Celtic spiritual traditions. This derives, ultimately from the fact that we descend from an ancient tribal context which lived day in and day out with an awareness of the ‘in between’ times and places.

“An emphasis has always been placed upon both those times and places which are betwixt and between. Whether it is the Time of Samhuinn (when the veil which separates us from the Otherworld of the ancestors and spirits is removed), or holy sites which hold the energy of these ‘in between’ places, such as a grove, holy well or where forest meets shore and stream, Celtic spiritual consciousness is steeped in an awareness of and a longing for the liminality of things.

“Indeed, it is believed that certain kinds of information are available to us in these ‘in between’ times and places; a realm called the Threshold (stairnseach in Scottish Gaelic). The time of Twilight, at dusk and dawn, the subtle shifting of the seasons, the sudden onset of a storm, or even the process of passing from everyday consciousness into sleep, trance, or meditation and back again, are all expressions of the liminal time and space that the Celtic soul thrives on.
...

“Columcille began the process of building the monastery at Iona, the heart of the Celtic Church in the North. He gathered together a large group of people as workers and builders, but for all their efforts, all that was built during the day would lay crumbled on the earth by next morning.

“At this point, Columcille set a watch in the middle of the night, hoping to secure knowledge of these strange events. However, akin to the falling of the built structure every morning, Columcille and his workers discovered that with each passing night, the people placed at the watch were found dead.

“Columcille, determined to go on, decided to take a night vigil upon himself and sat in wait for the knowledge of the delay. It is said that in the middle of the night a great being came to Columba from the surrounding waters and that the being was part-woman, part-fish, and struck great fear in the hearts of the men. Columcille unflinchingly inquired as to what was continually throwing down his efforts to build Iona.

“The water-spirit-being replied, “I do not know what casts the stones of your walls to the earth, nor what takes the lives of your brothers, but it will continue to be so until you have made the proper sacrifices.” Columcille was instructed that a man would have to be willing to offer himself to the ground, that he would have to be buried alive, but if this were done the likes of her would disappear and Iona would flourish undisturbed by spirits.

“The day following this visitation [vision?] Columcille approached the workers who were there to build the monastery at Iona. He told them of the previous night’s events but none of them was willing to go into the grave alive. Odhran, by some accounts Columcille’s cousin and by others his brother, came forward and is said to have stood with him. Odhran declared that he would be the one to offer himself in the sacrifice for the sake of Columcille’s work. Columcille accepted Odhran’s declaration and pledged that Odhran would forever have a place on Iona.

“The grave was made and Odhran’s only request was that Columcille make the grave deep enough for a man to walk around in, with a stone roof. Columcille agreed to these conditions and Odhran entered the grave, remaining standing within.

“Twenty days passed. The work of building the monastery at Iona moved forward, quickly, undisturbed. Columcille was very pleased. At the end of twenty days, Columcille declared that things were stable at Iona and they should all check on Odhran, to determine what had fallen his brother. When the roof of the nine foot grave was removed, it is said that Odhran was still walking around in the grave. Upon seeing the lifting of the stone slab from the grave, Odhran leapt from the hole and began to speak. Odhran reports to us:

“I have been below the earth. I have journeyed down there. I have been below the ground, to the world below this one. I have seen things, . . . glorious things. The place, what we call Hell, is not as bad as it is reported!”

“At this Columcille yells, “Clay! Clay! Upon Odhran’s eyes before he should see any further the world of mortal man. Odhran was returned to the grave, the stone slab returned securely over the hole. The building of Iona continued.

“... Although the original chapel was burned by Vikings in the late 9th century the current structure was re-built by Benedictines in the 12th century and is a testament to the ancient Celtic past. Relig Odhran, Odhran’s Chapel, also still stands today as a working chapel, meditation chamber, a protector grave for the graves of the various kings buried on the isle, as well as a pilgrimage site for many Celtic Christians and even a few modern shamanic practitioners who consider Odhran to be the ‘patron saint of Lowerworld journeys.’ “





ORAN’s VOYAGE TO THE NORTH

-- From Iona, Fiona McCleod (William Sharp), London: William Heinemann, 1912

It is commonly said that the People of the Sìdhe dwell within the hills, or in the underworld. In some of the isles their home, now, is spoken of as Tir-na-thonn, the Land of the Wave, or Tir-fo-Tuinn, the Land under the Sea.

But from a friend, an Islander of Iona, I have learned many things, and among them, that the Shee no longer dwell within the inland hills, and that though many of them inhabit the lonelier isles of the west, and in particular The Seven Hunters, their Kingdom is in the North.

Some say it is among the pathless mountains of Iceland. But my friend spoke to an Iceland man, and he said he had never seen them. There were Secret People there, but not the Gaelic Sìdhe.

Their Kingdom is in the North, under the Fir-Chlisneach, the Dancing Men, as the Hebrideans call the polar aurora. They are always young there. Their bodies are white as the wild swan, their hair yellow as honey, their eyes blue as ice. Their feet leave no mark on the snow. The women are white as milk, with eyes like sloes, and lips like red rowans. They fight with shadows, and are glad; but the shadows are not shadows to them. The Shee slay great numbers at the full moon, but never hunt on moonless nights, or at the rising of the moon, or when the dew is falling. Their lances are made of reeds that glitter like shafts of ice, and it is ill for a mortal to find one of these lances, for it is tipped with the salt of a wave that no living thing has touched, neither the wailing mew nor the finned sgAdan nor his tribe, nor the narwhal. There are no men of the human clans there, and no shores, and the tides are forbidden.

Long ago one of the monks of Columba sailed there. He sailed for thrice seven days till he lost the rocks of the north; and for thrice thirty days, till Iceland in the south was like a small bluebell in a great grey plain; and for thrice three years among bergs. For the first three years the finned things of the sea brought him food; for the second three years he knew the kindness of the creatures of the air; in the last three years angels fed him. He lived among the Sidhe for three hundred years. When he came back to Iona, he was asked where he had been all that long night since evensong to matins. The monks had sought him everywhere, and at dawn had found him lying in the hollow of the long wave that washes Iona on the north. He laughed at that, and said he had been on the tops of the billows for nine years and three months and twenty-one days, and for three hundred years had lived among a deathless people. He had drunk sweet ale every day, and every day had known love among flowers and green bushes, and at dusk had sung old beautiful forgotten songs, and with star-flame had lit strange fires, and at the full of the moon had gone forth laughing to slay. It was heaven, there, under the Lights of the North. When he was asked how that people might be known, he said that away from there they had a cold, cold hand, a cold, still voice, and cold ice-blue eyes. They had four cities at the four ends of the green diamond that is the world. That in the north was made of earth; that in the east, of air; that in the south, of fire; that in the west, of water. In the middle of the green diamond that is the world is the Glen of Precious Stones. It is in the shape of a heart, and glows like a ruby, though all stones and gems are there. It is there the Sìdhe go to refresh their deathless life.

The holy monks said that this kingdom was certainly Ifurin, the Gaelic Hell. So they put their comrade alive in a grave in the sand, and stamped the sand down upon his head, and sang hymns so that mayhap even yet his soul might be saved, or, at least, that when he went back to that place he might remember other songs than those sung by the milk-white women with eyes like sloes and lips red as rowans. "Tell that honey-mouthed cruel people they are in Hell," said the abbot, and give them my ban and my curse unless they will cease laughing and loving sinfully and slaying with bright lances, and will come out of their secret places and be baptized."

They have not yet come.

This adventurer of the dreaming mind is another Oran, that fabulous Oran of whom the later Columban legends tell. I think that other Orans go out, even yet, to the Country of the Sidhe. But few come again. It must be hard to find that glen at the heart of the green diamond that is the world; but, when found, harder to return by the way one came.


BONES OF FIRE

2004

How many regions in space
that have already been
Inside me. There are winds
that seem like my
wandering son.

-- Rilke Sonnets To Orpheus

And Manannan heard the man say:
“I will give you love and home and
peace.” The sea-woman listened to
that, and said: “And I will bring you
the homelessness of the sea, and
the peace of the restless wave, and
love like the wandering wind.”

-- Fiona MacLeod, “The Children of the Water”

Wind and wave both stir
the lyre you house in me
with fates from distant
shores. Through this
opened window float
those voices as if rising
from some outermost
inside, washing through
the maples in the front yard
with a high soft chant.
Surely it was ferried here
on the backs of whales
as they hauled between
the iceberg and the gale,
lamped only the burning
wings of northern lights,
their booming spume
and diving drone
intoning the angelic
northernmost
Hyperborean name of God.
Let me render back
that cold driven wilderness:
and ride here those foaming steppes,
a million-mile prairie
bordered only by an
infinite sky and miles
of brine below. Let Thor
hurl all his hammers
and Manannan reach
from the towering wave
to hand me his silver cup
from which all oceans
and ocean loves have poured.
Let shore-strewn stones reveal
their polar hearts,
still glowing with the
lucence of that drowned
constellation where we
coiled and plunged
through all the primal
names and woke up
alone to wander
on, like wind and wave,
between the ache of night
and waking dawn,
singing all the shores
that icy distant fire were
written on, bone
by noctilucent bone.





ORAN'S SINK

Taurus dracomen genuit
et taurum draco

“The bull is father to the snake
and the snake to the bull”
— Cretan symbolon

Coin the motions
I bell here a
Doubloon: On one
face blue Oran,
that dark raveller,
his mouth welling
antiphons of primal
cold: Turn the
coin over and you’ll
see me in this white
writing chair atop
a treelike esplumoir,
his dark book in one
hand, a gold pen in
the other, writing
down Oran’s slither
round and tween
the lines.
I found and fathered
him on this page,
though it is his
words which
engendered all of
mine — “The way
you think it is is
not the way it is at
all!” — a truth which
by its unknowableness
is by nature recessional,
bidding all who seek
to travel further down
and cross the page,
island to island,
poem to poem.
I have written down
what I found,
and what I found
has forged this song,
mortaring poem
by poem this
singing house
in buried blue.
The mystery is
as simple two
halves of symbolon,
a knucklebone
split in two and
shared by two parties.
One half is shaped by
lines on paper down
to here: The other
half is what lies
inside those lines,
or what comes after
them in a sheer
drop of white space
off the page — what
I’ll never know fully
upside down,
though each next poem
I surely try. Each
day I flip the coin
and watch it rise
then splash and
tumble down in
gold and black
revolvings, articulate
and not, tumbling
line by line down
the shelves of
ancient dark
til it disappears
from sight, surely
to rest at last
in Oran’s skull,
atop a pile of
prior poems. That
bowl of bone is coffer
to these coigns which
have no vantage but
their salt surrender,
at home and free to
whirl the sea-god’s
sky which only
seems a wetter darker
blue. Suburban
angel of that
winged descent, I
ride this writing
chair astride the
white flanks of a
dolphin with a dragon’s
tail and hooves of
raging bull: A modern
man troping
an ancient rage,
illuminating a black
page which only seems
as pale as bone. I
count my words carefully
into that lost half
buried purse at the
bottom of a wishing
well no one may drink:
For every breath
I squander here
here fresh bubbles
rise from Oran’s
cathedral sink.


***


DOWN ABYSMS HOME

From Kay Murh’s “Water Imagery in Early Irish,” Celtica 23, 196-7


Watery approaches to the otherworld are common in the early literature, down wells or under lakes or under or across the sea ... either well or sea can represent “the hazardous water through which the hero must pass to reach his Otherworld destination.

Different manifestations are functionally connected. A triad groups a well, the sea and new ale as “three cold things that seethe.”

The young poet Nede in “Immacallam in da Thuardid” finds his revelation on the brink of the sea,” and murbrath “sea-doom” is used of the eruption of the well that became Lough Neagh. A well on the side of Slaibh Gamh was thought to ebb and flow with the sea, and sid Nenta “the Otherworld dwelling of Nenta” has an epithet which varies between fo uisce and iar n-uisce “under” or “beyond the water”





CALL ME

2003

Call me Ishmael, call me
Lucius, call me Saint
Columb’s dream of Oran
boating toward news of
God across the badassed blue.
Call me foolish in this
landless enquiry, high up
the totem mast with endless
marge to view. -- What news
of heaven can be found
in such boneless toil?
Call me Columbanus
the stowaway who froze
in the wheelwell of
Air Eire and fell a mile
from Orlando International,
my bones heaped in
a wetland brake slowly
being drained by those
who would live here til
the tap runs dry.
Call me the little
girl in the fluorescent
green princess tutu who
toddered up to our door
last night so uncertainly,
spooked by the votive
bags with pumpkin faces
lining the driveway
and sidewalk, hesitant
to knock, too fired
by sugar dreams to flee.
Call me Mamacita the black
mother stray on the
guest room bed wanting
Out as she dozes, her tail
twitching at remembered
strikes at terrified squirrels.
Call me Cormac in
Manannan’s house, drinking
from a golden cup poured from
the sweetest well of all.
Call me Whoosis who is
sleeping off the Jack and
coke sprawled round a
French Maid still wearing
her garters and one shoe.
Call the the dark in
the window of this 5 a.m.,
faintly cool and very quiet,
voided of those graveyard
mouths who clamored so
to be heard -- a dark
harrowed now of hallows,
the rook and heath almost
icy in the late light of
a bent half-moon, nothing
stirring but this hand
whose oar and billows
I must be, author of the
selves inside the errant
elves who had their way
last night, or a part, carving
one night like a pumpkin’s
tomb. Call me Jack,
call me Freddy, call me
Nuckelavee the bog boor
who roams the shore
between vespers and
matins, an unquiet spoor
of the well that has lost
its door -- a spillage
greater than the sea’s,
a motion flowing all the way
to this moment’s late,
late lees. -- Call me the
lighthouse keeper in his
high stone chair, the eye
that roams the waves which
crash somewhere like
mountains of salt brutality.
Call me the jester in
the court of brine
immensity, the fool in
the chair whose pen
alone will dare what heart
and cock and brain cannot.
Call me old man Yorick
dozing down and down below,
grateful at last to let
this fizzing frenzy go
which only gods and gorgons
throne and thrall and
in full plumage show
who alone may cup
what’s here welling up.
Call me what you will,
I’m just the scribe
who got down the strange
sound of this quiet dawn
the day after Halloween
2003 -- And now that
work sights shore, call me
the guy who heads back
upstairs to bed to the actual
waking of the real life,
the one you’ll never find
though each page here
seems close enough --
ah, so infinitely close
and yet so far.


***


THE SOUL FISH

2005

... The soul is ambitious
for what is invisible. Hungers for a sacrament
that is both spirit and flesh. And neither.
-- Jack Gilbert, “A Walk Blossoming”

Wisdom consists in keeping the soul
liquid. There must be the Abyss, Nyx,
and Chaos, out of which all things come,
and they must never be far off. Cut off
the connection between any of your works
and this dread origin, and the work is shallow
and unsatisfying.
— Emerson, Journal (1842)

In rural Ireland -- where the men who
remain often fail to marry and then
go mad -- there is a stubborn folk belief
that the soul is a fish located under
the arm. It’s a slippery, untrustworthy
presence, this scaly soul, prone to
errant nonsense, whispering all night
from those men’s ancient pillows
to sell the farm and seeking love
across the banished oceans
of the earth. Pure foolishness, that
a fish would swim that far, just to
expire between some cuspate thighs,
when pints and pipesmoke are
almost enough tamp the grieving down.
Still, there’s something noble to
them about that fish’s travail, so bold
and burning that it knocks down every
church in the parish, leaving turds
in the chalice. Soul begone! is the
prayer for too-clenched teeth -- not the
soul we pray Michael row to heaven
but its fraught freezing sea, all waves and
salt liquor and fluked beasts who
loll and haul the tide like the
fifty cows of Tethys. It is the lurching
part of every desire that must betray
the long-denied bed. No wonder
schizophrenia runs rife in the poor
counties of western Ireland,
too close perhaps to those tall cliffs
of Moher where the distance to the
doomed sea is measured the ache luring
and leaping in the chest, somewhere
beneath the arm that pushes back
with a man’s failing strength. Their
churches too long ago banned that
fish from the liturgy, and now those
churches fade to ruin, ossuaries of
Latin embalmed in a hoarse brogue.
The crash of North Sea surf against
those cliffs will eat the heart of God
away and all the fish will tumble
down at last into the reign of foam
and fire. And then the good aged
crofters of Clare and Kerry will
quit their bruited turf and join
hands out there to dance and
then fan out to fey the bed
of every maid matron and crone,
a school of salmon leaping
from the lakes to barge their
way on home. And all the
gals will sing Amen my man.




DR. DAVY JONES’ LOCKER

Great God! How the sea whitens
When first it comes!
Great are its gusts
When it comes from the south;
Great are its evaporation
When it strikes on coasts.
It is in the field, it is in the wood,
Without hand and without foot,
Without signs of old age,
Though it be co-aeval
With the five ages or periods ....
-- Song of Taleisin (The Mabinogion)

My mind is too wild for your
tethering skull. I walk past
the school library at dusk
this late summer’s day,
huge storms ripping horizons,
the dark not so much falling
as rising from all I don’t know,
up from the corners of buildings
and streets of far ice, up
from the eyes of robed
deacons guarding all the doors,
like waters rising,
drowning commons and classrooms,
drowing this library at the
center of all, floor by floor,
knocking all books from their shelving
til they bump and bleat against ceilings
then go limp, dark to their spines,
freed at last to swim in the
black watery mine of a mind
molted here, my scholar’s career
tossed from view, sunk and split
and spilling pearls of swine truth,
chumming a red spoor to bright sharks
fanged in what I already always knew.





And finally, in this watery quest of a post down to some darker greater half of the heart, the house in the middle of the wood, the grail castle of Halloween, I end today’s installment with this marvellous tale of the Land Down Under from Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
edited and selected by W. B. Yeats (1888)

THE SOUL CAGES

T. Crofton Croker

Jack Dogherty lived on the coast of the county Clare. Jack was a fisherman, as his father and grandfather before him had been. Like them, too, he lived all alone (but for the wife), and just in the same spot. People used to wonder why the Dogherty family were so fond of that wild situation, so far away from all human kind, and in the midst of huge shattered rocks, with nothing but the wide ocean to look upon. But they had their own good reasons for it.

The place was just the only spot on that part of the coast where anybody could well live. There was a neat little creek, where a boat might lie as snug as a puffin in her nest, and out from this creek a ledge of sunken rocks ran into the sea. Now when the Atlantic, according to custom, was raging with a storm, and a good westerly wind was blowing strong on the coast, many a richly-laden ship went to pieces on these rocks; and then the fine bales of cotton and tobacco, and such like things, and the pipes of wine and the puncheons of rum, and the casks of brandy, and the kegs of Hollands that used to come ashore! Dunbeg Bay was just like a little estate to the Doghertys.

Not but they were kind and humane to a distressed sailor, if ever one had the good luck to get to land; and many a time indeed did Jack put out in his little corragh (which, though not quite equal to honest Andrew Hennessy's canvas life-boat would breast the billows like any gannet), to lend a hand towards bringing off the crew from a wreck. But when the ship had gone to pieces, and the crew were all lost, who would blame Jack for picking up all he could find?

"And who is the worse of it?" said he. "For as to the king, God bless him! everybody knows he's rich enough already without getting what's floating in the sea."

Jack, though such a hermit, was a good-natured, jolly fellow. No other, sure, could ever have coaxed Biddy Mahony to quit her father's snug and warm house in the middle of the town of Ennis, and to go so many miles off to live among the rocks, with the seals and sea-gulls for next-door neighbours. But Biddy knew that Jack was the man for a woman who wished to be comfortable and happy; for to say nothing of the fish, Jack had the supplying of half the gentlemen's houses of the country with the Godsends that came into the bay. And she was right in her choice; for no woman ate, drank, or slept better, or made a prouder appearance at chapel on Sundays, than Mrs. Dogherty.

Many a strange sight, it may well be supposed, did Jack see, and many a strange sound did he hear, but nothing daunted him. So far was he from being afraid of Merrows, or such beings, that the very first wish of his heart was to fairly meet with one. Jack had heard that they were mighty like Christians, and that luck had always come out of an acquaintance with them. Never, therefore, did he dimly discern the Merrows moving along the face of the waters in their robes of mist, but he made direct for them; and many a scolding did Biddy, in her own quiet way, bestow upon Jack for spending his whole day out at sea, and bringing home no fish. Little did poor Biddy know the fish Jack was after!

It was rather annoying to Jack that, though living in a place where the Merrows were as plenty as lobsters, he never could get a right view of one. What vexed him more was that both his father and grandfather had often and often seen them; and he even remembered hearing, when a child, how his grandfather, who was the first of the family that had settled down at the creek, had been so intimate with a Merrow that, only for fear of vexing the priest, he would have had him stand for one of his children. This, however, Jack did not well know how to believe.

Fortune at length began to think that it was only right that Jack should know as much as his father and grandfather did. Accordingly, one day when he had strolled a little farther than usual along the coast to the northward, just as he turned a point, he saw something, like to nothing he had ever seen before, perched upon a rock at a little distance out to sea. It looked green in the body, as well as he could discern at that distance, and he would have sworn, only the thing was impossible, that it had a cocked hat in its hand. Jack stood for a good half-hour straining his eyes, and wondering at it, and all the time the thing did not stir hand or foot. At last Jack's patience was quite worn out, and he gave a loud whistle and a hail, when the Merrow (for such it was) started up, put the cocked hat on its head, and dived down, head foremost, from the rock.

Jack's curiosity was now excited, and he constantly directed his steps towards the point; still he could never get a glimpse of the sea-gentleman with the cocked hat; and with thinking and thinking about the matter, he began at last to fancy he had been only dreaming. One very rough day, however, when the sea was running mountains high, Jack Dogherty determined to give a look at the Merrow's rock (for he had always chosen a fine day before), and then he saw the strange thing cutting capers upon the top of the rock, and then diving down, and then coming up, and then diving down again.

Jack had now only to choose his time (that is, a good blowing day), and he might see the man of the sea as often as he pleased. All this. however, did not satisfy him--"much will have more"; he wished now to get acquainted with the Merrow, and even in this he succeeded. One tremendous blustering day, before he got to the point whence he had a view of the Merrow's rock, the storm came on so furiously that Jack was obliged to take shelter in one of the caves which are so numerous along the coast; and there, to his astonishment, he saw sitting before him a thing with green hair, long green teeth, a red nose, and pig's eyes. It had a fish's tail, legs with scales on them, and short arms like fins. It wore no clothes, but had the cocked hat under its arm, and seemed engaged thinking very seriously about something.

Jack, with all his courage, was a little daunted; but now or never, thought he; so up he went boldly to the cogitating fishman, took off his hat, and made his best bow.

"Your servant, sir," said Jack.

"Your servant, kindly, Jack Dogherty," answered the Merrow.

"To be sure, then, how well your honour knows my name!" said Jack.

"Is it I not know your name, Jack Dogherty? Why man, I knew your grandfather long before he was married to Judy Regan, your grandmother! Ah, Jack, Jack, I was fond of that grandfather of yours; he was a mighty worthy man in his time: I never met his match above or below, before or since, for sucking in a shellful of brandy. I hope, my boy," said the old fellow, with a merry twinkle in his eyes, "I hope you're his own grandson!"

'Never fear me for that," said Jack; "if my mother had only reared me on brandy, 'tis myself that would be a sucking infant to this hour!"

"Well, I like to hear you talk so manly; you and I must be better acquainted, if it were only for your grandfather's sake. But, Jack, that father of yours was not the thing! he had no head at all."

"I'm sure, said Jack, "since your honour lives down under the water, you must be obliged to drink a power to keep any beat in you in such a cruel, damp, could place. Well, I've often heard of Christians drinking like fishes; and might I be so bold as ask where you get the spirits?"

"Where do you get them yourself, Jack?" said the Merrow, twitching his red nose between his forefinger and thumb.

"Hubbubboo," cries Jack "now I see how it is; but I suppose, sir, your honour has got a fine dry cellar below to keep them in."

"Let me alone for the cellar," said the Merrow, with a knowing wink of his left eye.

'I'm sure," continued Jack, "it must be mighty well worth the looking at."

"You may say that, Jack," said the Merrow; "and if you meet me here next Monday, just at this time of the day, we will have a little more talk with one another about the matter."

Jack and the Merrow parted the best friends in the world. On Monday they met, and Jack was not a little surprised to see that the Merrow had two cocked hats with him, one under each arm.

"Might I take the liberty to ask, sir," said Jack, "why your honour has brought the two hats with you today? You would not, sure, be going to give me one of them, to keep for the curiosity of the thing?"

"No, no, Jack," said he, "I don't get my hats so easily, to part with them that way; but I want you to come down and dine with me, and I brought you that hat to dive with."

"Lord bless and preserve us!" cried Jack, in amazement, would you want me to go down to the bottom of the salt sea ocean? Sure, I'd be smothered and choked up with the water, to say nothing of being drowned! And what would poor Biddy do for me, and what would she say?"

"And what matter what she says, you pinkeen? Who cares for Biddy's squalling? It's long before your grandfather would have talked in that way. Many's the time he stuck that same hat on his head, and dived down boldly after me; and many's the snug bit of dinner and good shellful of brandy he and I have had together below, under the water."

"Is it really, sir, and no joke?" said Jack; "why, then, sorrow from me for ever and a day after, if I'll be a bit worse man nor my grandfather was! Here goes--but play me fair now. Here's neck or nothing!" cried Jack.

"That's your grandfather all over," said the old fellow; "so come along, then, and do as I do."

They both left the cave, walked into the sea, and then swam a piece until they got to the rock, The Merrow climbed to the top of it, and Jack followed him. On the far side it was as straight as the wall of a house, and the sea beneath looked so deep that Jack was almost cowed.

"Now, do you see, Jack," said the Merrow: "just put this hat on your head, and mind to keep your eyes wide open. Take hold of my tail, and follow after me, and you'll see what you'll see."

In he dashed, and in dashed Jack after him boldly. They went and they went, and Jack thought they'd never stop going. Many a time did he wish himself sitting at home by the fireside with Biddy. Yet where was the use of wishing now, when he was so many miles, as he thought, below the waves of the Atlantic? Still he held hard by the Merrow's tail, slippery as it was; and, at last, to Jack's great surprise, they got out of the water, and he actually found himself on dry land at the bottom of the sea. They landed just in front of a nice house that was slated very neatly with oyster shells! and the Merrow, turning about to Jack, welcomed him down.

Jack could hardly speak, what with wonder, and what with being out of breath with travelling so fast through the water. He looked about him and could see no living things, barring crabs and lobsters, of which there were plenty walking leisurely about on the sand. Overhead was the sea like a sky, and the fishes like birds swimming about in it.

"Why don't you speak, man?" said the Merrow: "I dare say you had no notion that I had such a snug little concern here as this? Are you smothered, or choked, or drowned, or are you fretting after Biddy, eh?"

"Oh! not myself indeed," said Jack, showing his teeth with a good-humoured grin; "but who in the world would ever have thought of seeing such a thing?"

'Yell, come along, and let's see what they've got for us to eat?"

Jack really was hungry, and it gave him no small pleasure to perceive a fine column of smoke rising from the chimney, announcing what was going on within. Into the house he followed the Merrow, and there he saw a good kitchen, right well provided with everything. There was a noble dresser, and plenty of pots and pans, with two young Merrows cooking. His host then led him into the room, which was furnished shabbily enough. Not a table or a chair was there in it; nothing but planks and logs of wood to sit on, and eat off. There was, however, a good fire blazing upon the hearth--a comfortable sight to Jack.

"Come now, and I'll show you where I keep--you know what," said the Merrow, with a sly look; and opening a little door, he led Jack into a fine cellar, well filled with pipes, and kegs, and hogsheads, and barrels.

"What do you say to that, Jack Dogherty? Eh! may be a body can't live snug under the water?"

"Never the doubt of that," said Jack, with a convincing smack of his upper lip, that he really thought what he said.

They went back to the room, and found dinner laid. There was no tablecloth, to be sure--but what matter? It was not always Jack had one at home. The dinner would have been no discredit to the first house of the country on a fast day. The choicest of fish, and no wonder, was there. Turbots, and sturgeons, and soles, and lobsters, and oysters, and twenty other kinds, were on the planks at once, and plenty of the best of foreign spirits. The wines, the old fellow said, were too cold for his stomach.

Jack ate and drank till he could eat no more: then taking up a shell of brandy, "Here's to your honour's good health, sir," said he; "though, begging you pardon, it's mighty odd that as long as we've been acquainted I don't know your name yet."

"That's true, Jack," replied he; "I never thought of it before, but better late than never. My name's Coomara."

"And a mighty decent name it is," cried Jack, taking another shellfull: "here's to your good health, Coomara, and may ye live these fifty years to come!"

"Fifty years!" repeated Coomara; "I'm obliged to you, indeed! If you had said five hundred, it would have been something worth the wishing."

"By the laws, sir," cries Jack, "you live to a powerful age here under the water! You knew my grandfather, and he's dead and gone better than these sixty years. I'm sure it must be a healthy place to live in."

"No doubt of it; but come, Jack, keep the liquor stirring."

Shell after shell did they empty, and to Jack's exceeding surprise, he found the drink never got into his head, owing, I suppose, to the sea being over them, which kept their noddles cool.

Old Coomara got exceedingly comfortable, and sung several songs; but Jack, if his life had depended on it, never could remember more than

"Rum fum boodle boo,
Ripple dipple nitty dob;
Dumdoo doodle coo,
Raffle taffle chittiboo!"

It was the chorus to one of them; and, to say the truth, nobody that I know has ever been able to pick any particular meaning out of it; but that, to be sure, is the case with many a song nowadays.

At length said he to Jack, "Now, my dear boy, if you follow me, I'll show you my curiosities!" He opened a little door, and led Jack into a large room, where Jack saw a great many odds and ends that Coomara had picked up at one time or another. What chiefly took his attention, however, were things like lobsterpots ranged on the ground along the wall.

"Well, Jack, how do you like my curiosities?" said old Coo.

"Upon my sowkins, sir," said Jack, "they're mighty well worth the looking at; but might I make so bold as to ask what these things like lobster-pots are?"

"Oh! the Soul Cages, is it?"

"The what? sir!"

"These things here that I keep the souls in."

"Arrah! what souls, sir?" said Jack, in amazement; "sure the fish have no souls in them?"

"Oh! no," replied Coo, quite coolly, "that they have not; but these are the souls of drowned sailors."

"The Lord preserve us from all harm!" muttered lack, "how in the world did you get them?"

"Easily enough: I've only, when I see a good storm coming on, to set a couple of dozen of these, and then, when the sailors are drowned and the souls get out of them under the water, the poor things are almost perished to death, not being used to the cold; so they make into my pots for shelter, and then I have them snug, and fetch them home, and is it not well for them, poor souls, to get into such good quarters?"

Jack was so thunderstruck he did not know what to say, so he said nothing. They went back into the dining-room, and had a little more brandy, which was excellent, and then, as Jack knew that it must be getting late, and as Biddy might be uneasy, he stood up, and said he thought it was time for him to be on the road.

"Just as you like, Jack," said Coo, "but take a duc an durrus before you go; you've a cold journey before you."

Jack knew better manners than to refuse the parting glass.

"I wonder," said he, "will I be able to make out my way home?"

"What should ail you," said Coo, "when I'll show you the way?"

Out they went before the house, and Coomara took one of the cocked hats, and put it upon Jack's head the wrong way, and then lifted him up on his shoulder that he might launch him up into the water.

"Now," says he, giving him a heave, "you'll come up just in the same spot you came down in; and, Jack, mind and throw me back the hat."

He canted Jack off his shoulder, and up he shot like a bubble--whirr, whiff, whiz--away he went up through the water, till he came to the very rock he had jumped off where he found a landing-place, and then in he threw the hat, which sunk like a stone.

The sun was just going down in the beautiful sky of a calm summer's evening. Feascor was seen dimly twinkling in the cloudless heaven, a solitary star, and the waves of the Atlantic flashed in a golden flood of light. So Jack, perceiving it was late, set off home; but when he got there, not a word did he say to Biddy of where he had spent his day.

The state of the poor souls cooped up in the lobster-pots gave Jack a great deal of trouble, and how to release them cost him a great deal of thought. He at first had a mind to speak to the priest about the matter. But what could the priest do, and what did Coo care for the priest? Besides, Coo was a good sort of an old fellow, and did not think he was doing any harm. Jack had a regard for him, too, and it also might not be much to his own credit if it were known that he used to go dine with Merrows. On the whole, he thought his best plan would be to ask Coo to dinner, and to make him drunk, if he was able, and then to take the hat and go down and turn up the pots. It was, first of all, necessary, however, to get Biddy out of the way; for Jack was prudent enough, as she was a woman, to wish to keep the thing secret from her.

Accordingly, Jack grew mighty pious all of a sudden, and said to Biddy that he thought it would be for the good of both their souls if she was to go and take her rounds at Saint John's Well, near Ennis. Biddy thought so too, and accordingly off she set one fine morning at day-dawn, giving Jack a strict charge to have an eye to the place. The coast being clear, away went Jack to the rock to give the appointed signal to Coomara, which was throwing a big stone into the water. Jack threw, and up sprang Coo!

"Good morning, Jack," said he; "what do you want with me?"

"Just nothing at all to speak about, sir," returned Jack, "only to come and take a bit of dinner with me, if I might make so free as to ask you, and sure I'm now after doing so."

"It's quite agreeable, Jack, I assure you; what's your hour?"'

"Any time that's most convenient to you, sir--say one o'clock, that you may go home, if you wish, with the daylight."

"I'll be with you," said Coo, "never fear me."

Jack went home, and dressed a noble fish dinner, and got out plenty of his best foreign spirits, enough, for that matter, to make twenty men drunk. Just to the minute came Coo, with his cocked hat under his arm. Dinner was ready, they sat down, and ate and drank away manfully. Jack, thinking of the poor souls below in the pots, plied old Coo well with brandy, and encouraged him to sing, hoping to put him under the table, but poor Jack forgot that he had not the sea over his head to keep it cool. The brandy got into it, and did his business for him, and Coo reeled off home, leaving his entertainer as dumb as a haddock on a Good Friday.

Jack never woke till the next morning, and then he was in a sad way. "'Tis to no use for me thinking to make that old Rapparee drunk," said Jack, "and how in this world can I help the poor souls out of the lobster-pots?" After ruminating nearly the whole day, a thought struck him. "I have it," says he, slapping his knee; "I'll be sworn that Coo never saw a drop of poteen, as old as he is, and that's the thing to settle him! Oh! then, is not it well that Biddy will not be home these two days yet; I can have another twist at him."

Jack asked Coo again, and Coo laughed at him for having no better head, telling him he'd never come up to his grandfather.

"Well, but try me again," said Jack, "and I'll be bail to drink you drunk and sober, and drunk again."

"Anything in my power," said Coo, "to oblige you."

At this dinner Jack took care to have his own liquor well watered, and to give the strongest brandy he had to Coo. At last says he, "Pray, sir, did you ever drink any poteen?--any real mountain dew?"

"No," says Coo; "what's that, and where does it come from?"

"Oh, that's a secret," said Jack, "but it's the right stuff--never believe me again, if 'tis not fifty times as good as brandy or rum either. Biddy's brother just sent me a present of a little drop, in exchange for some brandy, and as you're an old friend of the family, I kept it to treat you with."

"Well, let's see what sort of thing it is," said Coomara.

The poteen was the right sort. It was first-rate, and had the real smack upon it. Coo was delighted: he drank and he sung Rum bum boodle boo over and over again; and he laughed and he danced, till he fell on the floor fast asleep. Then Jack, who had taken good care to keep himself sober, snapt up the cocked hat--ran off to the rock--leaped, and soon arrived at Coo's habitation.

All was as still as a churchyard at midnight--not a Merrow, old or young, was there. In he went and turned up the pots, but nothing did he see, only he heard a sort of a little whistle or chirp as he raised each of them. At this he was surprised, till he recollected what the priests had often said, that nobody living could see the soul, no more than they could see the wind or the air. Having now done all that he could for them, he set the pots as they were before, and sent a blessing after the poor souls to speed them on their journey wherever they were going. Jack now began to think of returning; he put the hat on, as was right, the wrong way; but when he got out he found the water so high over his head that he had no hopes of ever getting up into it, now that he had not old Coomara to give him a lift. He walked about looking for a ladder, but not one could he find, and not a rock was there in sight. At last he saw a spot where the sea hung rather lower than anywhere else, so he resolved to try there. Just as he came to it, a big cod happened to put down his tail. Jack made a jump and caught hold of it, and the cod, all in amazement, gave a bounce and pulled Jack up. The minute the hat touched the water away Jack was whisked, and up he shot like a cork, dragging the poor cod, that he forgot to let go, up with him tail foremost. He got to the rock in no time and without a moment's delay hurried home, rejoicing in the good deed he had done.

But, meanwhile, there was fine work at home; for our friend Jack had hardly left the house on his soul-freeing expedition, when back came Biddy from her soul-saving one to the well. When she entered the house and saw the things lying thrie-na-helah on the table before her--"Here's a pretty job!" said she; "that blackguard of mine--what ill-luck I had ever to marry him! He has picked up some vagabond or other, while I was praying for the good of his soul, and they've been drinking all the poteen that my own brother gave him, and all the spirits, to be sure, that he was to have sold to his honour." Then hearing an outlandish kind of grunt, she looked down, and saw Coomara lying under the table. "The Blessed Virgin help me," shouted she, "if he has not made a real beast of himself! Well, well, I've often heard of a man making a beast of himself with drink! Oh hone, oh hone!--Jack, honey, what will I do with you, or what will I do without you? How can any decent woman ever think of living with a beast?"

With such like lamentations Biddy rushed out of the house, and was going she knew not where, when she heard the well-known voice of Jack singing a merry tune. Glad enough was Biddy to find him safe and sound, and not turned into a thing that was like neither fish nor flesh. Jack was obliged to tell her all, and Biddy, though she had half a mind to be angry with him for not telling her before, owned that he had done a great service to the poor souls. Back they both went most lovingly to the house, and Jack wakened up Coomara; and, perceiving the old fellow to be rather dull, he bid him not to be cast down, for 'twas many a good man's case; said it all came of his not being used to the poteen, and recommended him, by way of cure, to swallow a hair of the dog that bit him. Coo, however, seemed to think he had had quite enough. He got up, quite out of sorts, and without having the manners to say one word in the way of civility, he sneaked off to cool himself by a jaunt through the salt water.

Coomara, never missed the souls. He and Jack continued the best friends in the world, and no one, perhaps, ever equalled Jack for freeing souls from purgatory; for he contrived fifty excuses for getting into the house below the sea, unknown to the old fellow, and then turning up the pots and letting out the souls. It vexed him, to be sure, that he could never see them; but as he knew the thing to be impossible, he was obliged to be satisfied.

Their intercourse continued for several years. However, one morning, on Jack's throwing in a stone as usual, he got no answer. He flung another, and another, still there was no reply. He went away, and returned the following morning, but it was to no purpose. As he was without the hat, he could not go down to see what had become of old Coo, but his belief was, that the old man, or the old fish, or whatever he was, had either died, or had removed from that part of the country.