Leaving Tralee

What better place to set down furtive thoughts
than here at the Imperial Hotel
on Denny Street at seven in the morning?
Not so much imperial as mellow
and darkened by Victorian décor,
this dining room is vacant but for us,
that harried-looking waiter and the one
he waits on, namely me. As for the page
I’m writing over tea too hot to swallow
I see it as a sieve, through which the pungent
odor of last night’s fish, the kitchen clatter,
the muted talk of patrons in the lobby,
and all the sights I have or haven’t noticed
are passing to their final destination.
But even as I mutter my lament
for all things unredeemed, unrecognized,
I’m thinking of the Sunday afternoon
I pulled a yellowed journal from the shelf
and found in it the features of a dream
of which I had no other recollection,
no tension in the limbs or in the heart.
If it survives, that story of a ride
through cobbled streets in someone else’s car,
it’s in those sentences, themselves imperiled.
Lift up your voices, cries the aging hymn.
Lift up your cameras, your pens and notebooks,
lest the images that flash and fade—
those taut inflections in a fleeting voice—
be no more lasting than a passing thought
and no less formless than a jotted dream.

Coming Soon...