Sitting in a pre-war bedroom, and windowless no less, and I cannot see the sky I so longed for. Cerulean, cloudless, less, even in the wintertide and eveningtide and the cusp between when the air should collect its mist like pollen on petals, dreadful filaments, it is empty. In New York, that is.

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Back in my old home, I used to crawl out of my skin when that dome of a sky was obscured: tourmaline film, city-dampened stars, and rain, oh, rain. Now I recollect the age-old adage. Without dark there is no light. Without clouds that mar and wither, there are no planks of sun-gold, geometric like rococo headdresses soldered in stained-glass, outstretching, tangentially widening with their moonbeam opacity. So what, oh what I wouldn’t give.

 

In Dublin, when that tropical climate hangs the clouds so low on their pearly strings, one’s physical place in the world beneath them is compressed-- seems so clear. The geo-mapping of self, a magnetic fit.  

They lectured about Boland. About how she passed her formative years in England, awash in the echo-burning that the ancient histories she learned were not her own. Awash, as the waves that hasten the shore. Not over sand, no, but with the trickle-chiming descents through sea-pebbles that warped the all-American beaches of my childhood into something more profound, more grey-seated. These stories don’t belong to me, either.

But that march down Dame Street, that vertical venture into history, could allow you for just a moment to think so. Daughters of the world, are we.

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I learned the origins of English in Ireland. An irony, no doubt, while yet a stone’s throw away from the land of cwena and cyninge, where dear Æthelthryth stole Bede’s affection. Literature’s hagiography, a fitting topic in buildings of stone. 

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And sometimes I still see myself in other peoples’ experiences there. Through gilded Georgian mirrors and newness. Think, when lights flicker in the subway caverns, with their darts of fluorescent gold, of the softer bokeh windings that steer through the city nights-- an chead stad eile-- and amount to home. A perceived future, a refinding. 

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I never did belong, not really. Even with more time, I could never partake in that shared past: no grannies lighting candles or continental train cars. My reverie. I think and think of pint-sized memories, mosaics, and expand them into the ever growing moodboard of the future. To leave my east coast in favor of another. To pull the veil of those nights of hardwood floors and candle wax dripping, up, up, over the now. There’s a solemn joie de vivre in reflection. 

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Oh guardian angel, let’s kip down on some other shore, let’s live a little. There grows transience in the immutable. Danielstown burns. And Lois grows up, in such a Dickensian jest. I read all through September waiting for that one scene. Waiting for the flames, silver-tongued cutlery as they were, to dissolve in a radiance the portrait of a woman. The scene never came, a fabrication--simple--, this word-of-mouth paratext that has guided my own interiority. 

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But I can still picture her. Draped in sea-shimmering fabrics. That teapot-skinned dignitary with all the chiaroscuro-softening of the museum-painter’s hand. The ascendancy, gone with the wind, and she, the alter-Cathleen. But the effigy of past grandeur takes a woman's form, doesn’t it? Paints a Dame Street lined with muses, a new commute for dear Eavan. Filled with Elizabeth and Molly and Lois and Mary and yes I say yes to that reality in which I am not pulled away but coexist. In which I get to be my own subversive historian, ready to belong in the text.

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