While the Future Is Putting Its Cards on the Table,
My Irish Side Fumbles a Handful of Chips

Just walking the Strand was like slogging through salt marsh
in a greenish dream.

Sometimes the littoral would vanish altogether. Tha's no rain,
it's Holy Water,

gushed the pub owner. The two of us mouthed sounds at each other
all down Fishamble.

At night the flashlights of wife, son, and a hundred sleepless
administrators

beamed me messages from a Nova Scotia outpost, across
the sodden Dublin sky.

Unmistakable, washing over me at the Abbey during "Big Maggie":
a fetor of clay,

as if the bilge and sludge of antediluvian Liffey were sloshing around
in French drains below.

Then Thursday, pre-dawn--everyone else gone off to Inishmore
while I, half-pissed on Guinness,

watched the spindrift sea unflesh itself to shingle, shell, one thin scrawl
of phosphorescence

I might have read the implication of, if only the moon held still,
or the tide had stalled.

copyright 2003 Steve Myers