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safe. This is the model for the food chain: the elements of feed, cowshit and what-have-ye, get lost in the shuffle by the time we sit down to the Delmonico or t-bone, likewisewe are blind to the copulation of chickens and the habits of pigs when we sit down to the bacon and the eggs. The process blurs—dead fish make onions grow, manure turns into hamburger and tossed salad.
    It was a good life. After nights of song and stories and poetry, common in the country in those years before televisions replaced the fire on the floor as the thing stared at and into, I wouldstep out the back door of the cottage and take my stance amid the whitethorn trees my great-great-grandfather had planted years ago as saplings brought home from a horse fair in Kilrush. And looking up into the bright firmament I’d piss the porter out—I was young, I drank too much—and in the midst of this deliverance I’d look up into the vast firmament, as bright in its heaven as the dark was black,and think thoughts of Liberty and be thankful to be alive.
    Y ears after, I would try to replicate these reveries when I found myself living in a large old house on Liberty Boulevard in a small town in Michigan. I lived next door to my funeral home and, returning in the early mornings from embalming one of my townspeople, I’d stop near the mock-orange tree by the back door of my home and lookup into the heavens and relieve myself. Some nights I would espy Orion or thePleiades and think of mythologies blurred in my remembrance of them and be thankful for the life of the body and the mind.
    Such was the firmament this night in Galway. Don and I had stood shoulder to shoulder before the famous green storefront of Kenny’s Bookshop in High Street, swooning and stuporous to see our books,our faces, and bold notice of our readings there in the window among the stars. And despite the flatus, harbinger of impending disaster, Don and I were glad to be alive. Glad for the soft air of springtime, somehow sweeter in Galway than Dundee or Michigan. And glad to be paid for giving out with poems when so few can say they were ever paid for the inner workings of their souls. And glad, I daresay,for the rooms provided for us at the Atlanta Hotel in Dominick Street by the Festival Committee—rooms with solid beds and flush toilets toward which we made our gaseous ways that mild Marchy night in the City of the Tribes.
    I still have the house in West Clare. Tommy died and Nora outlived him by twenty-one years, living alone by the fire. Then Nora died, just shy of her ninetieth birthday, atidy jaundiced corpse, made little and green by pancreatic cancer. She left the house to me. I was her family. I kept coming back to West Clare after that first time, year after year, though the visits were shortened by the building of my business and the making of babies.
    When her brother Tommy died, in 1971, she rode the bike into town and called from the post office. I flew over in time forthe wake and funeral. I think that was when she began to count me as her next of kin—the one she could call and be sure I’d come. I think that’s when she began to trust me with her own obsequies, mention of which was never made until the week before she died.
    Of course, first among the several changes I made was the addition of a toilet and shower. I added on a room out the back door and putin a bathroom like a French bordello, all tileand glowing fixtures. I had a septic tank sunk in the back haggard and declared the place all the more habitable for the trouble. I let it to writers when I’m not there.
    But for every luxury there is a loss. Just as the installation of a phone when Nora was eighty cost her the excitement of letters coming up the road with John Willie McGrath, thepostman on his bike, and the installation of a television when she was eighty-five meant that her friends gave up their twisting relations in favor of Dallas reruns, so the introduction of modern toiletry removed from Moveen