James Mele was born and raised in Bristol by parents of Italian and Irish descent. After receiving a B.A. from St. Lawrence University, he earned an M.A. in Anglo-Irish Studies from University College, Dublin. He has been published widely, and his first volume of poetry, “Dancing in Eurynome’s Shoes,” was published in 2017. In addition to teaching English for four decades, he has spent time working on his brother’s horse farm and also worked on a sheep farm in Ireland. He recently moved back to his hometown, where he now lives in retirement.
– Connecticut Poet Laureate Rennie McQuilkin
For J. Michael Lynch
I think of you there in the hills above Nice,
Your face bleached pale as the hospital sheets,
Your mind at twilight fraying around the edges,
Body too weak to bear your weight,
Joints and organs wearing out, one by one,
Like the parts of that old clunker car of yours,
That so often seemed to drive itself
As we traveled up from Dublin
Into the Wicklow hills and back again.
There’s no betrayal more bitter to bear, I know,
Than when the flesh turns traitor on us,
But remember, if you can, old friend, those days
How intoxicated we’d be on talk of poetry
And the grace in the blessing of women
As we climbed those narrow, twisting roads,
Just as drunk on words as we’d later be in descent
On pints of porter we drank at Mooney’s
Or that place tucked away from time in Lachan
Where a man could have a quiet drink
And watch over the half-door the ploughman
Lead his horses home in jangling harness
Through the celestial light of an Irish evening.
Take comfort that such passions of the mind
Still burn in you; some souls flame out
Long before the body ever gives them up
And falls into ashes and into dust.
Voice, the voice you always said,
Is what matters most, and forty years on,
The voice that breathes life into your lines
Still casts on me a druidic spell and leads me
Into realms of longing and of dream.
I hear it now in my mind, speaking disembodied
Out of the quiet shadows of that room
Where your son sits beside your sick bed
And writes down the words of poems
You grope for in memory and dictate to him,
Poems, they tell me, you made in your head
In the hospital amid the throes of your collapse,
Like some fili tossing on a stone bed
In the dark cell of an ancient bardic school.
It is so like you, for whom fame and fortune
And the foppery of playing the poet
Were never the spark of your inspiration,
Whose only ambition was to work
The rich soil of your mind, so like you,
Now fearing the end, to keep bending,
As broken as you are, to the task
And hurry to glean before the storm
The last fruits of your imagination.
Seannachie
His craft was the trade of Homer’s masters,
But no one had time for it anymore.
Now his neighbors sat in their separate houses,
Their minds enchanted by a voice on the wireless
As it told them the latest news of a world
A century away from their townland.
It struck their imaginations blind to his tales
Of a wilder magic, of impossible feats
And adventures on the farthest edge of reality.
No one crossed his door on winter nights to hear him,
No one, except now and again, some pale student,
Some serious-minded collector of dying things
Who came to record the last gasp of his art.
Yet he kept to his craft with the same passion
As he clung to the breath in his body,
Rehearsing twists of plots that had travelled
From mouth to mouth in a hundred different tongues
Across the continent, across millennia, to him
On that last wind-carved shore of Europe.
Though a man of flesh and blood and bone,
He was a ruin as sad and wonderful
As all the withering stones of antiquity.
They would see him in the fields or along the roads
Wrestling his dizzy memory to remember
A story he was telling to the sky, to the hedgerows,
Or to the bony rumps of his scraggly herd of cows,
Orchestrating it with broad gestures and wide eyes –
Like a madman raving, a stranger might think –
As he raised his voice into the dark, Atlantic wind
That gnawed his words down to a garbled moan.
Herding Sheep with Bill
There was no contradicting his calendar
Of superstitions – the feast of some saint or other
The sheep had to be herded off the mountain,
Culled and counted, dipped and
Doctored with shots for blackleg.
Wary of the ambitions of the young rams
He’d sired late in life and of their schemes
To get him to sign over the land to them,
He was resolved to give no one reason
To think he’d outlived his use:
He’d oversee it all himself, even if it killed him.
Defying wife and daughters, sons,
And doctor’s orders, he climbed the path
Behind the house in his old suitcoat and his fedora.
A step ahead of most of us,
He shamed us all with his uncanny vigor,
Pushing himself up the slope
With a blackthorn cane, his ice blue eyes
Fierce with the fury of his determination.
He was a quiet, gentle man in his chair
In the corner of the kitchen, sipping his tea
From the saucer or a glass of Smithwick’s,
Or filling his pipe with shavings from a plug
Of Mick McQuaid, but that morning
On the mountaintop he meant to leave no doubt
He was still boss on the place; he shouted
Orders at us and berated us with a coy disdain
For our ineptitude as shepherds. His sons
Bore the brunt of the abuse, the old man
Venting, perhaps, his righteous anger
At the heresy of cows they’d propagated
On the lowlands of the farm against his will.
Half-wild by then with the freedom of
Their summer grazing among the furze and the heather,
The white-faced Cheviots, elusive
As the clouds streaming over the Wicklow peaks,
Ran us and the young dogs ragged
With their anarchic dodging and darting.
He could barely restrain his exasperated delight
At our stupidity as he watched
Bands of rebels, half a dozen or so,
Here and there, strike off in every direction,
But the way we wanted them to go.
When we’d finally got the sheep trooping
In a flock down toward the pens in the valley,
He waved to us to come back up the hill
To where he stood next to a furze-floored gully.
A sheep man all his life in the lonely hills,
He knew the ovine mind better than he knew
The minds of men; he had an almost
Druidic knowledge of their tricks.
Something of a boy’s mischief was still in him,
And he must have thought it’d be good craic
To put on a little show that would give
A playful slap to our ignorance.
He tossed a stone into the bushes, and a leash
Of ewes leapt out of the ditch like doves
Fluttering out of a magician’s hat.
His eyes laughed at our perplexed surprise,
And he smiled to himself to know
He’d trumped our brash youth with his wisdom.
Men Working
The rain cannot be trusted to keep off
Under the moody skies in these hills
And there are still two wagonloads of hay
In the cut fields that need to be brought in
Out of the risks of the weather,
Bales well-cured and dry, sweet stuff.
It’d be a shame to lose them to the wet.
So, after our tea, fueled up for the last push,
We head out to the fields again.
The misty evening light is like a drug.
We’re all drowsy under its spell.
We get back at it with less than zeal,
Hands tender from the twine, muscles
Stiff now and sore from the tons and tons
We’ve stooped and lifted already today,
Loading and unloading the wagon,
Picking the fields clean, one by one,
And filling the hayshed high up into the rafters.
Something in us resists and says
We’ve earned our rest and our leisure,
But duty shouts it down.
Before the embers of the sun’s fire
Burn down to the ash of night
There are still three hours or more of light
In the high curve of these latitudes,
And we have things to do that must be done.
Soon enough, we break a sweat again,
Fall back into the rhythm of the work,
And begin to bear down hard on the task,
Every man eager to keep pace, pull his weight,
And not be thought a sluggard by the others.
Some stride toward the wagon
With a bale in each hand,
In something like an alpha male display.
There’s no horseplay, no banter, no jokes,
As there was in the brighter part of the day.
It’s strictly business now; we work in silence
With a fierce deliberateness.
The thing is just to get it done.
No one says it, but it’s on every man’s mind
We’re all desperate to finish soon enough
To beat the barman’s last call
And the merciless time bell in Mooney’s pub.
The real prize we strive for in this race
Is to steal an hour of freedom for ourselves
Before exhaustion washes over us
And drowns our senses in waves of dreamless sleep.
The rounds of pints will come fast and furious,
Each of us showing the color of his money
To prove he’ll pay his fair share.
We’ll down the drinks fast in big gulps
And out of the corners of ours eyes
We’ll scope the likely girls
Through the fog of the cigarette smoke,
Those few brazen enough to quit the ladies lounge
And drink with the farm boys in the bar.
Haying is thirsty work in more ways than one.
We need that time, we need it
To remind us we’re more than beasts of burden
And to keep up the hope in our hearts
That there is more to living
Than endless rounds of this brutish work.
Hide-and-Seek in the Ruins
of an Irish Abbey
In the gray, morning light,
I climbed worn stone stairs,
Winding in curious turnings
Under vaulted arches
Up from the courtyard of
The cloister to the dormitory.
My eyes lost focus
In the dark cells.
Ghosts of the monks
Who had brooded once
Upon riddles of silence
In those stone wombs,
Blind to all but
The naked word of the world,
Haunted me
With their fierce quest
For holiness.
I pictured them there
With their stark-boned flesh
Scourged and starved
Into dreams of God,
Their hearts giddy
With the mystery of
The light hidden in things.
Later, atop the bell tower,
A peat-smoke scented wind
Searched my face with
Soft messages of rain
That drifted
In a swirling mist
Like strains of harp music
Through the bare trees
And the winter fields,
Orchestrating the silence
With a vague desire
For a life unfettered
By the loneliness of bones.
The solid fact of things
Lost substance.
Brief moments of
Another world
Flickered into brightness
In the shifting
Distances of the mist.
Voices suddenly called
My mind back to itself.
Shouts of children and
Excited laughter shattered
The quiet of the morning
With echoes of
A dizzy game,
A surprise invasion sprung
From where
I could not guess.
Wild-eyed and red-faced,
They scattered
Through the ruins,
Clambering in short pants
Over the broken walls
To escape into secret places,
Hiding and seeking
In the electric darkness
Of the monks’ cells.
I listened to their voices
Slowly lose themselves
Among the abbey’s stones,
Then to turned to watch
A backlit shadow
Of a man
Fishing the river below.
Poems copyright © 2017 by James B. Mele. CT Poet Laureate Rennie McQuilkin selects work for CT Poets Corner by invitation.
