KarenW, Author at - Page 2 of 3

The storms unpack my groceries….

Posted on March 19, 2023March 19, 2023 by KarenW

I am in the cold, drafty heart of a cottage on the far flung island of Inishbofin. If you’ve seen Father Ted, it’s an island that’s smaller than that one. If you’ve seen the Banshees of Inishiren, then you’re closer. Minus the removal of fingers from the fiddle hand, mind you.

It’s my second time back here in two weeks. I came last week for seven days and stayed with two other writers in the four bedroom house I’m in right now. There was an anthropologist, a psychotherapist and an anesthesiologist. At least at first. The anesthesiologist had hoped it would all be less “self-catered” and took off halfway through her stay. She chose to leave on a stormy, windy day. The ferry was delayed in taking her off the island that morning, but we later caught a glimpse of the boat rounding Cromwell’s Barracks as we made our way to the only open pub since the power on the island had gone out and where were we going to go anyway?

So, we watched the little boat pitching up on the waves and motoring away into a wall of rain and wind until out of sight and we went into the dark pub and ordered hot ports and sat at a table and continued talking craft in fiction until the outside grew dim and then the power flickered back on.

Then I left the island for a few days and went back to Dublin for a about three days. But as St. Patrick’s Day grew closer, I felt a strong desire not to get swept up in the chaos and parades and drunkenness. Myself, I have been veering away from that sort of external and internal pandemonium and I just wanted writing and reading and quietude.

****

My roommate happens to be a writer as well. She has been living on and off this island for years and always seems to know if a cottage or house is open, which in this case, one was. So the day before St. Patrick’s, I found myself getting on a train to Galway which was so full, so jam packed with Irish heading to the west, that many of us sat or sprawled on the floor. There was a family of five children who camped near me and I was thankful to have remembered my noise cancelling ear phones as three of the children screamed and cried and climbed on me for about two hours. I just read books on my Kindle, occasionally lifted my head up to the window to see the lush landscape from the west rising into view.

The St. Patrick’s Day parade on the island consisted of a few cars following one another on the small road linking the Middlequarter to the West, all honking and flying Irish flags. Then there was a dinner in the community centre with three fiddle players and a guitarist playing music. Maybe 20 to 30 people were in attendance. The day was unusually calm, springlike even.

The rest of the time I’ve been staying solitary and hidden over at the house that was available (a mile from the pub and ferry). Gas is so prohibitively expensive in Ireland now (most heating bills are weighing in at 1200 euro and that’s not using the heat excessively either) that the preference leans to the old fashioned stove for heat. I’ve piled some coal in there, sometimes there’s peat available here, but mostly briquettes, and the flames are deep red and gold and the heat builds in this living room despite the wind chill toppling the outside temps to below zero.

Atlantic rain lashes. Its wind has several sounds it makes. Earlier, the storm was so loud, I thought someone had come in and was in the kitchen loudly unpacking groceries and closing doors. I even called out, “Hello?” with my heart racing a little. But when I went in, all the windows were pummeled with rain, sleet, branches and wind. Mystery solved. The storm had essentially moved in and unpacked.

****

My roommate left her cottage this morning on the ferry this morning and assured me the ferry was grand, as in it was ok. No one died. Still, I’m wary about getting out tomorrow morning. We shall see. In the meantime, I’m writing as much as possible and wishing I could extend this for another week without balancing it against work.

But with the bank collapses of late, more possibly looming, I’m not taking any chances of random time off unless it’s an actual trip somewhere. I have less to worry about here, but I still worry. Everyone worries. Especially in America. We are waiting to hear that other shoe drop. Promises (yet again) of Trump’s arrest. Russia, Iran and Saudis, N. Koreans and Chinese all having chats with each other just on the other side.

I’m writing a short story about liminal space between unknown worlds. You leave one familiar world where civilization is defined, or so you think. The main character goes far away to another country where she thinks the notion of civilization is upended. And when she encounters something terrifying and unexpected, the story has her escaping via a perimeter, some boundary between this new world and one even more lost to a lack of definition, one filled with even more danger, so things get murky.

It’s about Bangladesh. A moment I experienced over there. And sketching out a certain structural path into it and then out as I’ve not really tried structuralism before. I want to see what that it like, to draw a map and fictionally write the journey along those lines. Though, I think the conclusion the story will draw is that the space between the liminal is anything but structured.

****

I’ve been reading some Paul Bowles lately, it’s true. Also, Denis Johnson’s collection of gonzo travel based non-fiction: Seek.

“Security is a false God. Begin to make sacrifices to it and you are lost.”
— Paul Bowles

****

Cold shrinks the world to the bone…

Posted on March 1, 2023March 2, 2023 by KarenW

Plunging temperatures reminds us all that February, as it limps along, will only lead to March. A month of two minds, killer and grower. I am in my new place now, a gray brick house nestled amount other old homes (all over 100 years old) here in Ceannt Fort. The house is two short stories, drafty, has one bathroom and gas is expensive. Still, I save 200 euros a month by living here and better than that, I am living with a friend who is also a writer. So far, it is better than the joyless Croatian woman who was my roommate at the last place whose fascination for the Big Bang Theory went on for months as she watched the seasons on repeat.

The Big Bang Theory is like the blackface of comedy to me. Masquerading as something it’s definitely not (smart humor) in order to illicit cheap laughs through really, really stupid and decidedly sophomoric jokes. All complete with a loud and oft repeated laugh track since the audience obviously needs all the clues available to them to prompt obedient laughter.

And so week after week, month after month of her watching this show. The echos of the character dilemmas bouncing around the flat and seeping in under the door. It was time. Time for a move. I loved North Dublin and in spite of that, I’ve moved to South Dublin.

*****

The home I live in now has a decidedly more relaxed feel and energy to it. I would say I’m happy here. I feel in my own skin, so to speak, and I feel much more inclined to write here. The room itself has unusual beams in the ceiling and gives almost a cocoon like feel when I’ve got a few candles going and I’m wrapped in blankets and reading.

I find myself missing the dead in my life a lot recently. Not that I don’t think of them often. But the memories have been visceral lately. Mostly things like seeing a woman approaching me on the street and the way she turns her head, it reminds me of my grandmother. Or a tall, lanky lad sauntering on the sidewalk reminds me of JD who has been gone 4 years now. And I often talk with JD, for he was my confidant for a long time. As I was his. There’s a real void with him gone from the world. And my grandmother who helped me grow part of my heart. Who refused to shape it with shame and rigidity. She taught me all about the love of old things. But my heart still has the trappings of shame and rigidity, and the Irish know something about this. They seem to. They have the jokes and the stories and sometimes, the sadness, that belies this. Maybe I came to a country where people carry something similar. And we’ve agreed not to talk about it, but we see each other in the firelight, at times, and there’s a look that’s passed. Like saying, yes, we know.

This house I live in is filled with old and much cherished things. All things my friend has collected over the years. Each one with a story behind it. Each one sentimental. I remember sitting on the back patio all day in the sun (for it was the summer months I lived with my grandparents up in Graton, California) when I was 12 with my grandmother. Sanding furniture down, staining it, varnishing it. The smell of the old and the new all in one breath out there by the redwoods. I can smell the creek now. Mud and rotting apples and musty weeds. The ranch dogs sprawled on the ground next to me. Those dogs, they watched over me all day. I took it for granted, that kind of dumb animal love.

*****

I miss N. California today. Why is that? My mind sidewinding itself in between so many memories. What am I doing so far from home? Why did I come? It’s one of those days where I’m in between the sanding off of the old, cracked sheen of some kind of worn out varnish. In between adding coats of that darker stain that fills the cracks, in the end, just fine. Something aged and smoother, something that doesn’t hide the fissures. But I don’t know. It’s easy to have these moods, to think that. In reality, it’s a moment. It’s a continuance.

North-flying mallards overhead. Wild, whirling of wings and the wind’s breath shrinks the world to the bone. Things are returning. It occurs to me, today, that I have learned something from coming this far. Why did it take a lifetime to finally know who it is sitting here in the freezing kitchen all wrapped up in sweaters, channeling the Jimmy Carter of the late 70s? Time does funny dances in the mind. There’s a flow to things that seems more like the backeddies of a long river.

I suppose this is more sentimental than it needed to be. One of those moods, those after work moods. It’s staying light by 10 minutes each day. Time for that walk. There are a lot of places to walk down here in South Dublin. That way, I won’t be tempted to crank on the heat.

Infinity of variety

Posted on January 16, 2023 by KarenW

So one thing I’m celebrating is the completion of a year since I was issued my critical skills stamp visa. For the first year, I was not quite under Irish protection just yet. Thankfully, I didn’t know that until only a few months ago, otherwise I would have been panicking about being let go and being asked to leave the country and knowing how my mind works, I would have created scenario after scenario as to how this would happen. One of the reasons I like Thomas Pynchon’s works is his currency is that of paranoia. Most of my life, I have been paranoid about catastrophic things. But, over time, one learns to use it more as material than super imposed realities.

So when all the layoffs began in Silicon Valley and beyond, my manager was suddenly “transitioned out”. And then, upon further research, I realized I was not as safe from a similar fate as I previously thought. Year one is the Probation Year. More people were let go in the weeks following. Always with the company meetings (it’s a global company that one no one has ever heard of) that everything was fine, there would be no layoffs. But in the meantime, they had hired something akin to Darth Vader to take control of the engineering department. And so people were summarily let go with no warning.

So, I took it day by day. Sort of. And now, I am celebrating sliding in past the one year date and into the wide and welcoming arms of the Irish employment protection laws. Granted, it’s not France where one is taken care of for two years, but it’s something.

And in a few days, I will celebrate my actual anniversary…my arrival to Dublin on January 22nd. The beginning of a two month saga of hotel surfing, moving every four days to chase the low rates. Competing with all the Irish service workers who came back to Dublin immediately following the January 23rd announcement that the “Irish had defeated Covid”.

Shortly I will be coming up on the end of a year’s lease at my current apartment in Dublin 3. Time to find a new place as this was always meant to be just first year’s lodgings. At the musical bingo last night, the beloved musical bingo night at the local, I was telling someone how sad I will be to leave that place, but it would be better to have more room to write. To find more stories. He said, well, one ting ‘bout Dooblin is…it’s an infinite variety of stories. ‘Dat’s the ting for sure. Go and find the other stories all waitin’ oot dere for you.

In other news, it’s cold here. At 32 degrees each day. Some rain. No snow. Holidays are done. Everyone is returning to their inner lives and looking forward to spring. But Dublin is always full of a kind of warmth, just from the people alone. Also, now is when the music really comes out to get us through the next few months. And I’m writing a lot more…essays and poems. And working under protection. That one too.

You might come here Sunday on a whim…

Posted on January 6, 2023 by KarenW

A few friends asked me if the stabbing headaches have subsided and I’m happy to report, indeed they have. All it took was solid sleep and going back to the gym and writing a lot with the days off I had this week. I am back to work on Monday, but I do enjoy the time off.

I’ve been following the weather news in California. Floods, trees down, all of it. Part of me is jealous I’m missing such an epic series of storms in San Francisco, but I know it’s not anything close to fun for those who had to break the sandbags out or go without power for hours on end. There’s rain here in Ireland today, of course. A lovely wash of roiling grey skies and occasional spears of water. Deep cleaned the flat today, out with the auld, in with the new.

Found myself missing a few poets from Seattle. Roethke and Richard Hugo. Has to be that weather putting me in the mood for it. So I’m dropping a poem in here by Richard Hugo, one of my favorite place poets, truth be told. Though over the last week I finished Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets, and almost done with a book of essays called Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish by Tom McCarthy. Lots of reading, writing (a few poems even), sleeping. It conspires to make the world a bit better, larger…all that. Here’s one of Hugo’s most iconic poems…with that arrow sharp opening….You might come here Sunday on a whim. Say your life broke down….

Degrees of Gray at Philipsburg

–Richard Hugo

You might come here Sunday on a whim.

Say your life broke down. The last good kiss

you had was years ago. You walk these streets

laid out by the insane, past hotels

that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try

of local drivers to accelerate their lives.

Only churches are kept up. The jail

turned 70 this year. The only prisoner

is always in, not knowing what he’s done.

The principal supporting business now

is rage. Hatred of the various grays

the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,

The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls

who leave each year for Butte. One good

restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.

The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,

a dance floor built on springs—

all memory resolves itself in gaze,

in panoramic green you know the cattle eat

or two stacks high above the town,

two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse

for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.

Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss

still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat

so accurate, the church bell simply seems

a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?

Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium

and scorn sufficient to support a town,

not just Philipsburg, but towns

of towering blondes, good jazz and booze

the world will never let you have

until the town you came from dies inside?

Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty

when the jail was built, still laughs

although his lips collapse. Someday soon,

he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.

You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.

The car that brought you here still runs.

The money you buy lunch with,

no matter where it’s mined, is silver

and the girl who serves your food

is slender and her red hair lights the wall.

Ice pick in the skull

Posted on January 4, 2023 by KarenW

Exhausted. Sharp pains at the lower left base of my skull. They come and go. I Google it, of course, since that’s what we all do even though we are told not to and not to believe all the various ways Google tells us we will die from whatever it is we are suffering from. Well, life. Growing older. Sudden head pains. Perhaps I’m having a small stroke.

Occipital Neuralgia, the page reads. Intermittent shooting or shocking pain in the upper neck, back of the head or behind the ears. Bingo. There it is. Will it kill me? The causes vary and almost all of them can apply, each with their own story. My past concussions, two while in grad school, one in Seattle. Arthritis of the upper cervical spine. So I have RA and the scariest moment of that disease was when it started affecting my neck. Wearing down the fluid in the joints that could not be replaced. I used to imagine my head falling off.

The list goes on. Alcohol, not eating enough, eating too much, stress, wearing glasses too long. So it’s like a strange collection of writing prompts. “Tell us your life in ten words of less with each topic:”. A kaleidoscope of past maladies coming home to roost in my final demise which turns out, of course, to be a stroke that takes away all movement in one side of my body rather than humanely killing me outright. No, I tell myself. This literally is exhaustion and stress. Work has been stressful. And I ran myself ragged in Paris. Too much good food and wine. Also, I have not slept well in a few days. Battling insomnia as always, as always. It never stops. Last night, I probably slept maybe 2 or 3 hrs. I gave up at six am and read until the sun decided to join me.

Naturally, Covid is surging, the flu is surging. There is a 900 person wait for a hospital bed in Dublin alone. I am still inexperienced with the health system, but I wonder if this isn’t just in the public hospital? Is the private hospital at normal capacity? One odd thing about the private hospitals is that they close at night. I once fell while in Sligo and injured my knee. It swelled up so much that I thought it might explode and produce strange children. Like a pregnant knee. I was with J. and we went, after hours, to an urgent care. The guy who I saw after a short wait did not inspire confidence. He said, “I’ll give you a shot. Painkillers.” Mind you, I was excited to receive that if it was some of the good stuff. “Are you allergic to aspirin,” he asked. “Aspirin?! Is that what the shot is?” Yes, it was a shot of aspirin.

We left there with a note clearing me to go to the hospital. Since I had the private insurance, we asked the cab to take us there. “No it’s closed until the marning.” said the cabbie with the usual Irish resignation mixed with the lilt of a joke buried in there somewhere if we wanted it. It did not open until 9am. So we drove through the Sligo dark to the public one. The cold was just coming in for the fall. We could smell the heavy earth smell of peat fires coming out of the chimneys.

At the public one, they told me it would be a ten hour wait. Covid, he said, had overwhelmed them. There was a waiting room with the ability to hold about 5 people. We looked in at everyone through the wire mesh window and there were coughing people stacked on top of one another. So we went back to our little rented house and used frozen peas and watched a movie designed against any thinking. Some wretched thing that made me laugh in horror. When I woke the next day, the knee was no longer swollen. And I could walk again just fine.

There is no moral to my story.

Tolka Fish in a slow polka under the Sturgeon Moon

Posted on December 28, 2022 by KarenW

Dublin. It is often referred to by a few of my new friends as the “big smoke” (then again, so is London, right?). I imagine this nickname is well earned from cold mornings and coal fires stoked up in all the tiny fireplaces. It’s winter. Dead on. Today I came out onto my balcony and looked out over the North Wall all the way out to the Dublin Mountains (hills, really, they are hills). Smoke clumped and then it wearily took an exit as the wind stirred. Then the ritual repeated in the air.

It’s not that cold, but 11C is frigid for some. I don’t why I am so impervious to cold weather. Why it doesn’t affect me much. If anything, I could go colder on this whole winter thing. I thought maybe it would be darker too. And when will the strange static electricity of the vastness begin a dance or two on the horizon. Green flash fairy, a dance of pent up storm suns. String up the air with it. I’m ready.

Still some hate all of this. The cold, the rain, the damp, the breath of death on the neck to remind you you should have brought a scarf.

I joined a writer’s group. And though we meet once a week, politely sitting around in the Westin occasionally complaining about the hotel musak being too loud, we slog through our various works, we brave one another as audience. So the woman who runs this workshop invited me to a Thursday morning one. But this one is different. It’s a few writers (well, including me, it would be 3 or 4) who talk about Dublin as a place. Who sit around in a cafe in the basement of the Museum of Literature and deep map Dublin in conversation and then we read poems about Dublin, strange outtakes from old books, look at books called Rivers of Dublin and then discuss the odd project to set our sails for on next week’s horizon. So my project was to pick a river in Dublin and write about it. Investigate it. Map it. Photo it. Sketch it. Understand it. Throw something into it.

So I have you now? River Tolka. River, river, river. I think of river teeth. That old exercise. What has river teeth? Memories of summer. That summer when… Very American it is, those wistful summer memories.

So far my impression of the Tolka is this. Walking home at the beginning of fall. The moon rose full and it was a Sturgeon Moon. I paused on the bridge going over the Tolka in the moonlight, me and a few Irish in fact, and I heard something lightly sucking at the water below. I leaned off the railing only to see these large, silvery, slow fish rising and falling in the moonlit water. Coming up like koi or carp to mouth the water meets air boundary. But they looked different. Salmon at the end of their migration run? I asked someone. Naw, day are mullet there, he said. And pointed to the shapes rising and falling. They are good to eat if ya can catch ’em. They’s hard catch though.

I took a few photos of the moon and left for home. And whenever I walk over the Tolka, I pause, lean over the dark waters and look for those fish. But I haven’t seen them again.

Shook foil smeared with toil…

Posted on October 25, 2022October 25, 2022 by KarenW

I’m not the biggest fan of Halloween. I don’t love dressing up. Also, I find Halloween parties kind of exhausting. You can conclude from this, already, I might not be the kind of fun you want around on Oct. 31st. But I’m very much looking forward to Samhain which, like all Irish words, is not pronounced phonetically. “SOW – in” is the correct way to say (mh is pronounced like a W in Irish), but honestly, no one here would be too offended if an American started pronouncing Irish words the wrong way. More like, they are amused when people try to say Irish words without knowing anything about the strange ways the words work.

The other day I was waiting for a bus in N. Strand, where I live, when a gang of tracksuit lads all marched past me, out in the middle of the road, dragging stolen bins full of wooden pallets. There was an older tracksuit lad in charge of them, shouting at them to pick up the pace before the Garda came. Apparently, Samhain bonfires are a big deal here. I, for one, am looking forward to the Samhain bonfires. See, I think that would have more impact on me…looking out over the North Wall and seeing illicit bonfires lighting up the sky in the Dublin dark. Fireworks exploding blue flowers and green shimmer over the canal.

My roommate had tried to get me excited about the prospect of a Halloween party in our apartment here, but truth be told, I didn’t share the excitement. This will be my first Samhain and I’d rather attend something like the Bram Stoker festival. He lived right around the corner from where I live now and finished Dracula right here in the Big Smoke (Dublin). The Irish love their famous writers and what good would his hard work be without a proper festival to celebrate?

When I walk into downtown, I pass by his old row house on the way in. I wonder if he got to enjoy the same tax free status on book sales that the modern day writer publishing in Ireland gets to enjoy? Probably not. It was a long time ago. And the Irish passed the law protecting artists from taxation in the late 60s. Quite a few European artists move here looking to save proceeds on their books or art this way. Irvine Welsh did it (well actually, it was for other reasons but he still signed up for the scheme and probably got well deserved money back in his pocket). Honestly, I think America should do this. Can you imagine? Encourage artists to make a living off of writing or painting?

Anyway, I got on the bus and rode all the way up north to Glasnevin cemetery. Brought the camera and spent a few hours slow walking around taking photos, making notes. The only disappointment was the fact that it was sunny and bright out. I had been hoping for dark skies, moody light, a spit or two of rain. Still, Ireland’s famous people are buried there so it’s a bit of a history lesson. You can learn a lot from a graveyard out here.

So most Irish rebels, thinkers, politicians are buried there, including (much to my surprise), Gerard Manley Hopkins, the genius who developed sprung rhythm. I always think of this one, God’s Grandeur, when I think of him. The way this first stanza hit me in college when I first encountered it is a memory I still associate with really wanting to be a writer. Give it a try out loud. It finds a power there.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

Shook foil. Ooze of oil. This was pretty groundbreaking stuff back in the Victorian era. There’s a lot in this stanza, but when I read it, it feels charged in its own right with the frictive energy of sounds rubbed together in close, tight ways…ways to discharge the energy of the sublime into a poem that continues on past his death, past our own brief beach bonfire fire flashes in the night. God, the sublime, that which is bigger than us.

I don’t care for the whole Higher Power verbiage some might use to politely denote the very fabric of the Universe. I’m not a believer in a god. But I do believe the universe is astonishing in what it contains and how it works (as if I knew, even, how it works) and I think we are merely a microscopic organism, burrowed into some other microscopic organism, riding parasitically on the skin of the infinite. Hopkins uses words to spark a poetic conflagration. Anyway, he passed at forty four in Dublin (he was English but also a Jesuit priest and then taught here in Dublin). So he is buried here.

Then I made my way to the Gravedigger’s pub for a pint after. It’s so named for the tradition the pub had of passing pints out the window balanced on shovels for the gravediggers as they finished (or perhaps even just continued) the task of making sure the dead were buried in their plots.

Spoke for an hour or so to a man about my age about the chemical composition of Guinness. How nitrogen works. How molecules work together to change the very nature of a substance. A brief rain came out of nowhere and a hard deluge found our heads, which we all enjoyed while crowded together on the small walkway in front of the pub (one must always drink outside of the Gravediggers, not so much inside), and the barkeep came out with his awning rod to extend the awning over our heads so no one would feel like they needed to seek shelter.

The man and I covered a wide variety of subjects. Matthew McConaughey, whom I learned is a great guy because he’s nice to everyone on the set (this guy’s friend works on films…or as he pronounced it…”fil-ems”). He also revealed to me the best car to have for the coming apocalypse, which is a Toyota Hilux. We spoke about Bill Gates (our man in this conversation has a special hatred for Bill Gates). The Trump slow motion indictment nightmare and whether or not he will end up in chains and what the fuck America, like, just arrest him already! Death, school, politics, and life in Ireland before 20 years ago and life in Dublin now. The rain began to soften. Then stopped altogether and the world looked clean. Shining. Shook out and hung to dry. The last of the day speared through the clouds and swept the cemetery one last time, then the evening dark set in. Then, he and I parted ways and after dinner, I was home in bed before ten. Early darkness is the tonic, right now, for my insomnia. Exhausting, it can be, spending a dreaded sunny day in the cemetery.

A dreaded sunny day and we drank by the cemetery gates…

“A dreaded sunny daySo let’s go where we’re happyAnd I meet you at the cemetry gates”

The arrows that feed us…

Posted on October 21, 2022 by KarenW

Sitting in the Irish dark. Sitting in the Guinness black mouth of morning. Small snippets of sky. Movement of ancient east. Seagulls not yet. To have been there all along. To contain all the supplies you need for life. Dreams or more featured events. Balloons that hurt. Planes that sink. Wimmer wimmer goes the wind, clam shell pock in the mud like foot prints. Waiting, still, in the Irish dark. Rumble of train, tumble of noise. That low anapest of inked in rhythm. Shot through with it, we all are. Best to leave that arrow in. We will grow around it. We always do.

———-

Well that’s my brain dump after I get up. Whatever remnants of dream kicking around thrown out of the slop bucket onto the page… My morning exercise if you will.

I have been waking up in the dawn dark at 5:30 or so and quietly, quietly shuffling my feet along the laminate floors (don’t wake the roommate) to the living room to write. Though it’s not to write, per se, it’s my time to do with what I want. When I was home in America, it was apparent how little time people have for themselves there. Children are the predominant takers of time. Thieves of time, the young ones are. And they are so lucky to have it move slowly in them. My many friends who have kids, I can see through them what I put my parents through. The choices you have to make because you have this love for the humans you’re raising.

Then the other thieves, employment. The career, the almighty American career. Or the job, slaving away at the job and being treated as disposable. Hanging on and giving everything. What else? Oh, I was in San Francisco, so let’s be completely honest…hedonism. The card games with friends, the theater shows, the drag shows, the spectacle of the San Francisco streets, the dinner with friends, the drinks with friends. The music, the endless sublime music played live in a airy stage of eucalyptus and cypress trees all there in Golden Gate Park. The heady intoxication of memory.

But I’m home now. You hear that, America? H O M E….Ireland, is home.

Just off the plane, I go into the little Spar store (think Irish 7-11 for you ‘Mericans) there in the airport and got a bottled water. Waited in line. Took sips from it for I was thirsty. The older Irish woman, the long days of Spar work etched into her face ushered me over.

“We’ll just use the self-checkout, it’ll be quicker,” she intoned not looking convinced. I put the bottle on the side that weighs it after scanning it and the machine complains the product doesn’t match. “Oh shit,” I exclaim, “the weight is off. I drank from it.” She tries entering more buttons. We watch together as the screen flashes more denial, more messages that the product is wrong, we are wrong, nothing can be tallied. “Fuck it,” she said with a laugh, “you’re grand, go on then.” I almost wanted to hug her. We both smiled, made eye contact and started to laugh. Off I went with my free Spar water. Lucky me, lucky charms.

——

I was having a conversation with someone about my time in East St. Louis. When I attended aircraft mechanics school. I was telling her about this guy at the school (it was a sorry little community college plunked down in the industrial landscape of Granite City, Illinois) and how he invited me to his house for beers. He had a large purple Mohawk. He lived there with his mother. Out of the bedroom window, we could see the bar across the street, the 19th Hole.

“My mom used to work the men in that bar right there,” he said as he popped open a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. I looked at it in the gray light. Tired neon half illuminated. “Worked?” I asked stupidly. “Yeah, you know…worked,” he said with emphasis. “Oh,” I replied stupidly, “ooohhh, I see.”

I was retelling the story about him. How he hoped to fucking christ becoming an aircraft mechanic would get him out of there forever. That he would never have to come back to Granite City and look out his window to see his mom tottering outside in the dirty snow laughing with the guys who worked in the steel mill down the street.

The steel mill closed when I lived there, thanks to NAFTA. The few months that followed, the sheriff went door to door on my block to all those squat peeling paint homes with an eviction notice in hand. Can’t pay the rent. Time to get out. And watching their lives piling up on the street. Kids, dogs, couches. The middle class gone in an instant. I always wondered what happened to him. I quit that school not long after. Headed to New Mexico. When I fly, I think about all the maintenance logs on the plane. Who is watching over the engines.

These poems were published back in 2005. Reprinted here (on a private blog not geared for any search engine). Hopefully, it’s ok to put these two poems here. (Marin Poetry Center Anthology – Vol 8 2005).

Children of Lir and other such swan songs

Posted on October 19, 2022October 19, 2022 by KarenW

Now that fall is finally here, I mean summer was quite the slog for me (yes, yes…I keep banging on about my sensitivity to heat) and there were definitely great moments and all that, but I’m relieved the seasons have changed. That I get to see seasonal change in Ireland. But let’s be honest, I came for the rain, the dark skies, the stories, the craic, the sense of new place…I came to be closer to Europe (someone told me a few weeks ago, “well Ireland is only sort of in Europe”) and to write.

I fell into a fitful sleep at eleven pm only to wake at five to a drip drip drip. I had left my backdoor open because the night was too warm to sleep in without the cool air. Trains were coming to life but there was also rain. A thrill ran through me. Rain means better writing!

I got up and sauntered into the dark living room, got my Barry’s tea and immediately my mind went to that Gordon Lightfoot song “In The Early Morning Rain”. Sure, why not? So on it went softly on the speaker. Usually it’s jazz or some radio from WFMU or WWOZ, but today we are going soft 70s classics.

The other day I had to go to IKEA to look for cheap shelves that could get my art supplies out of clutter mode. As I walked the labyrinth of the place I marveled how it looked just like every single other IKEA I’ve provisioned myself from (I’ve moved a lot in America). It almost felt like I was back in America except I rode a double decker bus to get there listening to Irish Folk Tales read out loud on my headphones.

There was one that I enjoyed whilst the bus went speeding past the big graveyard and botanical gardens (Glasnevin cemetery is worth an afternoon) and it was a parable on jealousy. And hot days. A mad step wife takes the four children of the king, her husband, swimming on a hot day and turns them into swans for 900 years so she can have the king all to herself. Time goes by, but the swans still had their beautiful children’s singing voices and the sound of them became legend. The spell more or less broke at the end of the 900 years when they heard the bells announcing St. Patrick bringing Christianity to Ireland.

My takeaway from this was beware of hot days on this island. Otherwise, bad things happen. Indeed, a friend of mine (I am making friends here slowly) went back to Inishbofin to do another 2 week writing retreat there (this is where she and I met) only to wake up one morning to find the islanders dropping large bottles of water in front of the cottage doors. Apparently, Inishbofin ran out of water thanks to the lack of rain all summer. The reservoir itself seemed large enough to me, was quite nice to look at, and supplied everyone with captured rain water well enough until the last part of this summer. The same one that saw half of France on fire and the rivers all running dry thereby cancelling Viking River Cruises for posh, rich, white retirees from America.

Inishbofin Resevoir

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Running low on water on the island of Inishbofin in western Ireland…

Anyway, I cruised through IKEA ignoring screaming children and stressed families. Found my shelves which I will likely sand and paint to erase the distasteful IKEA look from them and drop my paints and brushes in there. And my photo mounting kits, for I am decorating the apartment now with the photography I’ve been doing…it’s expensive to have photos mounted, so I’m teaching myself to do not only that, but a bit of mixed media art as well. Keeps the mind sound. And it mixes in with the writing.

Yesterday, my Croatian roommate got up and came into the kitchen, as she does each morning at 7:50am, to look outside at the blue skies. “Oh, grand!” She exclaimed in her thick Croatian accent (when she does this there’s only one way to read her employment of this oft used Irish phrase, grand, as in it’s being used as sarcastic) “It’s going to be a beautiful day. Nice and sunny!” And on this note she left knowing how much I dislike the sun. Ha ha. Two can play at this.

Much to my unbridled joy, I can return the grand observations of the weather back to her in about twenty minutes, “Ah look! Grand! It’ll be raining all day! What weather that is for working and writing and sipping the tea!”

In other news…it looks like Cork is hosting Ireland’s largest jazz festival on the Halloween weekend. I’m kicking myself that I probably won’t be able to afford it, but maybe…if I can find a room for rent. Ah but it’s Cork. Small and probably everything is booked. Might be interesting to see what happens when Samhain (Irish for Halloween and pronounced SOW in) and jazz combine in late fall. If I’d known ahead of time, I would have budgeted.

Regardless, time to go to work. Speaking of…

Spirals and descents into Irish death drives…

Posted on August 26, 2021May 3, 2022 by KarenW

Which wild way do the midge fly on the Atlantic coast? From famine huts to beehive huts. Roiling mist clouds in the Gap of Dunloe to the searing hot Irish sun pinkifying our skin to the hot sear one imagines wouldn’t be possible in a place known for the cooling rains to assuage the climate change trauma. I’m from California. The whole state burns, LA gets our water like a hungry lamb shoving its head rudely through the mesh wire fence near the stone huts to greedily drink its fill so none of the others can have a drop. That’s what LA is with its gold courses and lawns. Lawns.

Ireland is a lush wonderland full of perfectly timed streams and brooks. Loughs. Medieval mists. We drove and drove and each time it was beyond terrifying. Corkscrewing down the spiral roads of death. The old stones with spirals carved in them from before the Pyramids. It all comes together. Spirals into one another beyond time, the corkscrew death drives and the ancient stones. All of it. Not just a circle of life thing, this experience. A death spiral where we often find ourselves on one part of the journey we will never return to. But from one element of the deepening descent, we see clearly where we were and the future is a blind hairpin turn with no way of knowing if there’s a car or lorry or out of control mad man just around the other side.