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could call in the middle of the night if there was trouble. They remind me of my father and of Gladstone. Maybe they’ll say I remind them of him.

Crapper

    Death and the sun are not to be looked at in the face.
    —L A ROCHEFOUCAULD , M AXIMS
    D on Paterson and I were crossing the Wolfe Tone Bridge in Galway contemplating Thomas Crapper. This was at early o’clock in the morning on our way back from an awful curry at the only Indian restaurant open in Galway in the wee hours. The night was mild, and our thoughts drifted toward talk of Crapperas the air behind us burned with the elemental fire of flatulence. It was an awful curry.
    Why else would two internationally unknown poets, in Galway to recite our internationally unheard of poems, the guests of the Cuirt Festival of Literature, be talking about the implications of the invention of the flush toilet and about its inventor, that dismal man whose name shall forever be associatedwith shit? Why else?
    Here, after all, was an opportunity to tender vengeance toward the man who’d damned, by faint praise, my most recent book of poems—in the TLS for chrissakes! Indeed, given Don’s fairly damaged condition—a night of drink, the aforementioned curry—I could have pitched him headlong into the Corrib and watched him bob up and down out to Galway Bay humming like Bing Crosby, anodd and gaseous swan gonebelly-up from bad food and good riddance. But really the review wasn’t as bad as it was, well, “fair” and any ink is better than no ink, after all. And I like Don. He’s an amiable Scot, a Dundonian, and a crackerjack poet if, like myself, not exactly a household name. It could be worse, I tell myself. We could be Crappers. And he still drinks well, in a way I never did,allowing excess to be its own reward—a little change from the teetotal life I live back in Michigan, where I haven’t had a drink in years, suffering as I do from all of the “F” words: I’m fortyish, a father of four, a funeral director, and full of fear for what might happen if I go back on the Black Bush. So I don’t.
    The first time I was ever in Ireland was twenty-seven years ago. Driven bycuriosity about my family and my affection for the poetry of William Butler Yeats—an internationally known poet—I saved up a hundred dollars beyond the cost of a oneway ticket and lit out, twenty and cocksure, for Ireland. Several of my generation were going off to Vietnam at the time but I’d drawn high numbers in the Nixon lotto so I was free to go.
    What made me so cocksure was the faith thatmy parents would bail me out if I got too deep into trouble. So I wasn’t exactly like Kerouac or Woody Guthrie but I was, nonetheless, on the road. Or more precisely, flying the friendly skies. When I located my cousins Tommy and Nora Lynch—brother and sister, bachelor and spinster—they lived in a thatched house on the west coast of Clare, in the townland of Moveen, with flagstone floors, two lightsockets, a hot plate and open hearth, and no plumbing. Water existed five fields down the land, bubbling up in a miracle of springwater, clear and cold and clean. I soon learned to grab the bucket and a bit of the Clare Champion and on my way down for the precious water, I’d squat to my duties and wipe my ass with the obits or want ads or the local news. It was my first taste of Liberty—to crapout in the open air on the acreage of my ancestors, whilst listening to the sounds of morning: an aubade of birdwhistle and windsong.
    Tommy and Nora kept cows, saved hay, went to the creamery and, as any farmer knows, dung is a large part of that bargain. It greens the grass that feeds the cow that makes the milk and shits again: a paradigm for the internal combustion engine, a closed system,efficient as an old Ford. And so the addition of my little bits of excrement to the vast dung-covered acreage was hardly noticeable, like personal grief among paid wailers, it gets lost in the shuffle and becomes anonymous and