Poetry | January 06, 2022

EARLY MORNING, GALWAY, 1998

I’d walk downhill, bayward, down to the French café where I worked in a
country that wasn’t mine. The air had the chill clarity of the shop
windows a few men were washing in their white suits and caps—the same
men each day; I waved—as white gulls carved roundy shapes and calls
into the blue overhead and burly kegs rolled loud down the cobblestones
with alarming force and buoyancy, barely under control, until they were
guided with sudden grace down into a pub’s dark cellar. On that
morning, which is many mornings that shine in time as one, I too
arrived, slowed by heat, dense smells, Thierry’s grouchy gaze as he
wound the kitchen like a clock. I tied on an apron fresh from the
laundry sack and tried to tamp my joy, or let it find a narrower
tributary (comradely co-misery) that Thierry wouldn’t mind. Later,
others would join us: More waitresses. The window washers, done for the
day, flirting and ordering heavy English breakfasts as they tipped their
chairs back like boys I remembered from school. Lunchtime tourists
squinting and turning their heads like birds whose gazes I’d try not to
meet for fear of recognition that I was like them and didn’t belong. I
wanted to feel at home and also entirely free. I almost managed it. The
scene rustles its subtle senses, itself torn free, a page blowing wildly
down the thoroughfare, then lifting for a life-long moment into the sky
over the bay.