Greg Rappleye

“To be sure, marriage was no more attractive an option in America

                           than it had been in Ireland. On both sides of the ocean, many couples

                           were miserable.”

                                       “Irish America” by Lawrence J. McCaffrey, The Wilson Quarterly,

                                         Vol. 9, No. 2 (Spring, 1985)

It was a deranged midnight brawl

over rent squandered at the harness track,

or perhaps over a mystery woman, who lived

in a second floor walk-up on Rundle Street.

But above all our American nights, this was legend—

screams, wingéd ash trays, shattered bottles,

a wall splattered with blood that would copper-brown

as a martyr’s relic, holy and untouched,

into a new millennium, the Philco and its duct-taped

bunny ears, chucked out the door to smithereens,

the berserk words tumbling through spittle

flecked lips and Looney Tunes lipstick,

the syllables of which we knew

were mortal sins the nuns would drag us off

to confess, were we to chant them in sing-song voices

on the whirl-around at St. Mary’s School,

until Mam was locked in the bathroom

slashing air with a straight-edge,

primed to cut Da’s throat, and Da outside the door

battering it to splinters with a smash hammer

and my sister, age 8, came whispering

to our rooms. She’d crept down the stairs,

descending through a haze of Lucky Strikes

and spilt booze and called for a cab to rescue us.

We tip-toed to the front steps, the youngest weeping

and even there, the battle-bangs of that fight: the screams,

the assault on that door, echoed across the porch

and through the fizzy, still-sparking tubes of the Philco,

as a vast Checker cab—headlights, top sign and taillights

glowing—nosed along the curb as if it were

the Cork ferry snuggling to berth, with acres of room

for weepy kids in underpants and half-pajamas.

The cab driver, who took the Host at our church,

sputtered at first, saying No and no to my sister,

but hearing Mam’s screams, the crash of glass

and curses, the porch lights snapping up

and down our street, sighed a centuries-old Celtic sigh

then drove without words the six blocks

to our aunt’s American foursquare and left us,

knocking up her front door, all for what coins

my sister scrounged, sifting lint from the sugarless sugar jar.

And surely they raged on, or so claim the neighborhood sagas,

with pikes and axes and epic broadswords,

with daggers and cause-lost flags,

wearing the shirt-mail they’d woven from thick skeins

of alcohol and desire, laced through metallic scales

rasped and scatter-loose from immense silver carp,

and it did not occur to them when they woke—hungover,

blooded, bruised and still coupled for life,

that we were not there. That we were gone.