By Sean Thomas Dougherty

It is so hard to breathe some days, what with the news and the secret police, the disappeared and our armies bombing cities, and work. But today I am having trouble because my anatomic system has been fucked for years since the virus. I have to tell myself to breathe, tell myself to breathe the way we have to tell our body to begin when we are most exasperated, startled, or in shock—and for some reason I think of the story my friend Chris Kennedy told me of his cousin, his cousin who left Syracuse New York in the early nineteen sixties, his wild Irish cousin who caught a freighter to France, and worked as a merchant marine, then eloped from the ship as it passed Malta and dove into the sea, swam to shore and, shivering, walked up a hill and into town to find the house of the poet Robert Graves. And there in the luminosity of a Mediterranean moon, the great poet opened his door to find the muscled young man in sailor’s gear standing before him, his hair still wet, and the poet uttered, “Yes, may I help you?” And Chris’s cousin, the one who years later would be a driver for the IRA, said, “I love you.”  And the great poet, taken a bit aback, looked at the sun tanned and dark haired young man and said, “Well, then you must come in.”  And Chris’s cousin stayed there and worked as Robert Graves assistant and lover for a couple of years, before later absconding to Ireland where he fought for the cause of Irish freedom. I think of his cousin catching his breath a thousand times throughout the decades. How one can be so brave and brazen, to live such a life, when I have done little more than stay in my room? Tonight, I am pondering the end of Joyce’s The Dead, with the snow falling and Gabriel lamenting his failures and his wife’s love of Michael Furey. I look away from the book, look out the window at the snow. Across the Great Lake, the snow falls with its own fury, covering the city with a heavy silence, the big lake nearly frozen to the Canadian side like a great white slate with cracks you can see from space like letters scripted by God’s hand. Our lake shore has dunes, like the dunes of the dead along the Atlantic Way, where, during the Irish genocide, the earth grew too full to hold more bodies, and so the living dug mass graves in the sand, and near Mayo along the Irish coast, when the great west wind blows off the ocean waves, you can find human bones, the phalanx of the starved still reaching through the veil, refusing to be forgotten, pleading give them alms, give them their daily bread.

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Sean Thomas Dougherty’s (he, him) most recent book is Death Prefers the Minor Keys from BOA Editions. New essays in Brevity, Craft, Common Ground Review, Midway Journal, River & South, and Talking River Review, A longtime disability worker, he works the third shift as a Medtech and Carer along Lake Erie, and teaches part-time for the MFA Program in creative writing at Western Connecticut University.