Local - Poem

LOCAL

   In an Irish pub, vatican
   of stout and fags, I travel back
   a family generation, to the land
   of an honest man's failing. With such

   no other island is so richly
   endowed. I myself was many years
   inclined to honesty but now deceive
   myself perhaps and others, having come

   a decade--more--ago to the crossroad
   where the pure refusal of a drunk's
   grave meets the compromise of walking
   the crooked lane conscious.

   I cannot bear to watch the man
   who so delights them in a parody
   of dance but watch them watch him
   with smiles that shine communal and

   benign, whose brother, just months past,
   himself was swept--like an ill-advised
   explorer in the ocean-caves below
   this Fisher Street bar--away

   in the gay and honest waves of drink
   turned savage in the innerworld, turned
   toothed and clawed in the changeless
   village tide that always turns.

LINDA McCARRISTON is Professor in the M.F.A. program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. Her first collection of poems, Talking Soft Dutch (1984), won an Associated Writing Programs Award. Her second collection, Eva-Mary (1990), won the Terrence Des Pres Prize, and her third collection, Little River (2000), was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in literature, two Vermont Council on the Arts fellowships, and the Consuelo Ford Award of the Poetry Society of America.

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