Sean, vaguely disgruntled, walked past the noisy partying in the Temple Bar area and headed back to Grafton Street. He did not like this Dublin as much as the one he and Peggy had experienced six years before. A line from Auden about William Butler Yeats ran through his mind: Mad Ireland hurt him into poetry. Well, Sean was irritated, but nothing hurt him into poetry anymore. He hadn't written a thing since he left the States.

The next day was better. After the train trip to Monasterevin, County Kildare, he had found a B & B within a couple of kilometers of the Hopkins Summer School where he was to read a paper on Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wallace Stevens. Whether anyone would buy his theory that the Jesuit priest and the agnostic insurance salesman were kindred poets of self-preservation, he had no idea. It didn't really matter. Here he was, living for a week along the River Barrow, breathing the air of his ancestors, with four pubs and innumerable pints of Guinness a short walk away. Just last night he had gotten his best laugh in quite a while when he passed the advertisement outside Mooneys pub: grocer, auctioneer, bar, undertaker. That man had things pretty well covered.

The next morning, face tingling from a cold-water shave and last nights bouts with the creature, he started out for the old school which served for conference headquarters. He watched a young boy about Mikey's age, thirteen, climb up the river bank with a fine trout on his string. Feeling some connection with the lad and anxious to try out his morning voice before facing his colleagues, he said "Good Morning." The boy looked him over -- there couldn't be many briefcase-carrying Americans in this rural town, and said, "Doin' the Hopkins thing are ya?" Sean smiled, delighted at the question, and answered with one of his own: "Doin' the fishin' thing are you?" He almost said "youse" in his effort to sound authentic. The boy said, "I am," and turned away with his fish, probably thinking little more about the exchange. Sean, however, was buoyed by the incident. This was the Ireland one came to see. This might be the tape he would need to replay were he to scratch out some poems on the flight home.

As he walked further he came to the two dilapidated buildings he had noticed last night out beyond the bog at the bend of the river. Then the ruins had seemed dark, even a bit foreboding, but now, in the light of morning, the ancient stones seemed colorful with their ivy tendrils and with two white horses poking their heads into the grass along the base of the buildings.

A short way down the road Sean saw the corner apartment with its hand-painted sign. A simple arrow pointed up the hill. Summer School he read, a somewhat deflating designation, Sean thought, for an international conference. As he approached the door he passed the sculpture James McKenzie had erected at the conference site.Sculpture may have been too formal a word, since this massive grey tree trunk, hollowed by winds and waters, excavated by McKenzie from the mud, was probably two tons of rotting oak. Yet when James called their attention to the almost-human shapes shooting upwards from its ugly base and touching side to side, the illusion was of four or five giant human beings, heads bowed in a circle, a family at prayer. This four- thousand-year-old bog oak had been sculpted all right, though not by James. It was his sculptor's eye which saw a Famine Family, as he called it, lying in the ancient oak. It was this he now bade others see therein.

Sean, whose Irishness was confined to a few neighborhood Celtic Music and Poetry nights back in the state of Washington, singing Kevin Barry and The Risin of the Moon, a man unable to trace his family back further than 1850 on either side, was moved by the old tree and its eerie resemblance to the suffering men, women, and children, among whom were his own emigrant forebears, people forced by circumstance to flee in the late 1840s the land they so dearly loved.

Grateful for the moment, happy to feel some emotion in his parched academic soul, he strode toward the coffee and sweet rolls which he knew awaited him. As he waited for the first session to begin, he fiddled to find a pen in his pocket, not so much anxious to record Takeshi Onos' take on Hopkins sprung rhythm, but with a small, mad hope that in this morning's several quiet memories there lurked a poem or two trying to struggle out of the muck of his tired heart.

* * *

Sean slammed down his third Powers whiskey , eager, now that night had fallen, to anesthetize himself against the pain he had today been pressing down. Where were his reading glasses, he fumed; he wanted to commit to memory the Guinness slogan on the cardboard coaster before him, lest the words slip entirely away.

He had also been upset two hours ago when Mrs. Mallon, the woman who had promised to launder his clothes told him she hadn't gotten to it yet because she had to take her Timothy, a man in his late seventies, thirty miles away to the doctor's after a flare up of emphysema. His. Exactly why this news should irritate Sean was unclear to him even now, and it grew less clear with each pint he consumed. Maybe Sean was simply lonely. He was, after all, drinking alone, yet he knew in his heart of hearts that a bout of loneliness was not the whole story. Something else was astir in him, and he felt he lacked the skill to explore it.

What, he wondered, were Peg and Mikey doing back in Seattle. With soccer matches and theater benefits to go to, they probably didn't miss him. He almost laughed aloud as he guessed that his melancholy surely was a gift from the Irish. What other culture could possibly embody Patrick Pearce's wonderful line, "The beauty of this world does make me sad" better than the Irish do? Ah, yes, he sighed, that's the Irish sensibility all right! It wasn't serving Sean well tonight.

As he slowly made his way back to the B & B, shambled back, he was afraid an impartial bystander might think, he thought again of the brief encounter with the young boy who wondered if he was part of the Hopkins conference. What must Sean have looked like to him? Did his American bearing overwhelm his ancestry? Was his age, mid-forties, a detriment to any truly substantive communication? Was it not obvious that he had never scrambled down or up a bank with a brook trout banging against his thigh?

Looking left and right, Sean saw that he was alone enough to risk the impropriety of relieving himself under the waning Irish moon. He knew that Mrs. Mallon would never approve. Why had he been too embarrassed to ask someone at the pub, The Manley Hopkins, whether there was a restroom somewhere? Now that he thought about it, he had hesitated simply because he didn't know if it was a loo or a head or a restroom to the locals, and he didn't want to seem a foreigner, an American. Why was everything such a crisis to him, Sean wondered. What ever happened to the carefree, loving husband and father who could sing silly tunes for hour on end when Mikey was a baby and then a toddler? Why was he, just half the age of his parents, suddenly so old?

His walking resumed; he had completed the trip to his lodging for the second time today. He'd sleep well, of that he was sure. Tomorrow his presentation would be the first event on the schedule, and a few scholars had told him they looked forward to hearing his paper.

With any luck at all, he'd meet the fisher lad again, or see the horses, or find in the Famine Family sculpture some of the emotion his life was missing. He quietly entered the Mallon's tidy house from the back door and tiptoed to his bedroom. There on the bedspread lay his clean clothes with a note on top from Mrs. Mallon. "Wear these in good health, Dr. Leahy. Timothy's on the mend."

- Don Foran