In the diocese of Dublin and Glendalough
up along Dame Street, past the Olympia
and Dublin Castle, in earshot of Christchurch
bells, Werburgh Street Church stands above
Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s vault, atop of
Swift’s baptismal font, not a stone’s throw
from where birth and death records lie,
like coordinates to be plotted, half-truths
waiting to be lies on deValera
and McQuaid’s map of cardinal truths.
I take down oversized red bound birth
books for 1965 in the records room,
turn pages heavy with births from Skull,
Mizen and Hook Heads to Sheep’s Hollow
beyond boarder crossings, flyover latitudes,
boreen longitudes and oyster beds where sand
and grit form pearls under blatherwrack,
an irritant stuck inside the oyster’s body
swaying to salt making free with buoyancy
around the Ring of Kerry and Cliffs of Moher
as I run my finger across districts and parishes:
Annagor, Belmullet, Cahir, and Drumcondra
the Swine of Pigs, in the diocese of Clonturk
where real fiction lives. Though not the Book
of Kells, it illuminates a pentimento of fibs,
stretching back to the foundations of belief.
Not five minutes shy of two hours I lean into
a past of myself, as unrecognisable as a wild
pearl, iridescent and luminous as the shell itself
or my fingerprint smudged. Reading my birth
name given is like a foreign language forged
in copperplate, a kind of twisted mother-tongue
as if finding the needle, without eye or haystack,
purposefully sent to hit a dead end by the grace
and blessings of the Archbishop’s handmaidens.
Without Theseus thread of Adriane, nurse Gallagher
cuts the chord, registers me by her own hand,
every slope and ink incline a natural fabrication
of this twenty-six year old’s maiden name, who
didn’t comfort me as my first tooth breaks through,
hold me at night as my breath is given over to
coughing for the loss of you, or watch me not fall
down as one foot follows the other in a gait you’d
half recognise disappearing into a crowd years later.
Instead you commend me into the geometry of a life
you’d not foresee. All the while, wondering from a distance.
Copyright © Anne Fitzgerald 2017
