W.B. Yeats: Selected Poetry
Edited by A. Norman Jeffares

Emerald Memories – I bought this paperback about a dozen years ago from a Broderick’s Newsagents in Galway – or maybe it was in Westport or even some other town. Wherever I purchased the book, I clearly remember reading Yeats’ masterful words as my family and I traveled to and from Sligo, Ardmore, Killarney and Shannon. Along the way, I scribbled notes on the book’s inside covers, random thoughts and observations that now read like poetry:

A wedding at the Hotel Silver Swan. Monomania. Two half past … and ten past one. Baby in a dung trough. Not mean; wounded. "The poor creature, her health is failing." The brook, the birds chirp-chirping, the wetness around my shoes, the fat cow’s moo, the sun stays warm – warm on my face. Feeding black Smoky (with the brown belly), tugging grass as a tractor thrashes the rolling field, reaching over rusted barbed wire bound to square, wooden posts – farm cats trotting, toppling, wrestling, running again – the whomp-whomp of Smoky’s lips closing around a handful of pulled weeds and grass, the chomp-grind of her teeth, two then three blows of air – she’s a chest-high pony and I find myself thinking of Black Rages … Later, Bobby Darrin and Fats Domino wail from the tractor’s radio and Goldie the dog jumps aboard when called. The 10-mile neighbor kid who four years ago spent three months in Boston – and came home talking about electrical storms, the likes he’d never seen. Ireland: where you can’t find a straight road – or get a straight answer. Pip the border collie, too. And the glass blower at Waterford. Step dancing. Residential gardens. Grandpa’s hand shadows. Shanty, lace-curtain, bicycle-seat Irish.