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MY GRANDFATHER'S CHAIRRowan Mangan
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'I see thy willow-darkened stream,
Thy sunny lake, thy sunless grove,
Before me, glassed.'
James Clarence Mangan, 'Childhood'
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Before ocean,
before distance, there was music
in me
and in the elbow of the dark room
was my grandfather's chair
where he flung the melodies of my first dreams on smoke
into the soft waiting air, crying
Music, for God's sake!
We'll have music.
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I would scrape the head from his stout with a spoon
and taste rust,
taste blood.
Time was a song, then, and my heart
a bodhran beat;
my breath thrummed along
with my grandfather's voice
as his slipper kept time on the carpet.
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But melody became memory
when he put down his fiddle
in the late afternoon
and in his hands the mandolin
told that sorrow
is the sweetest song.
My grandfather sang me his Ireland
and the aching ebb of time's
savagery
was mine.
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Living is longing, he sang
from the corner, from the green chair,
and home is the place you abandon.
I squatted at his feet for a childhood or so,
the space between us smaller than a sigh
and Ireland flew through the window
with the last dust-speckled sun
as I drifted with him
along the slanted rays of the past
towards darkness
afloat on the mandolin.
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In his green chair
he played the old songs,
he played his memories;
I learned to listen to the
spaces
between weeping notes.
I learned the language
of tiny silence
and heard in it
the stories he never told,,,
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A deep winter river
glows red, sunset-stained,
long ago,
and a boy fishing on the bank
fades gently to shadow
with the last chorus
of my grandfather's song.
I watched the crimson river
burn valleys in him slowly.
In life, in longing,
on the winding route
to night.
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And then he'd had enough
so he was burned
and he was boxed,
and after ocean, after
distance,
he was poured back into the Nore,
suddenly
history.
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But I will ride the future
to the land we travelled from his chair.
I'll string my guitar by the river,
and play for him, a boy still
at twilight,
holding up his rod against first dark.
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For joy lives within sorrow
like the silence in song
and home is the people we sing with.
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