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Dark City

James Mulhern

My only memory of you—
in the dark hallway of your Boston house,
just off the sunny kitchen.
I was two and you sixty.
Tall and thin, wispy hair, light-blue eyes
illuminated by a slant of kitchen sun.
“You don’t know me?”

I couldn’t speak,
but I understood what you meant when you rubbed my head
and walked down the shellacked hallway towards the parlor.

You died in your sleep a few years later.
Years of hard work behind you—
a gravedigger during the day,
hauling bags of mail onto the trains
at South Station every night.
Raising five children.

Close to your age now,
I visit your homestead in Ireland.
Cars whizz by where once was a dirt road.
No one lives in the tiny stone house.

I hear birdsong and smell cut grass.
The air is cool and damp.
Sheep amble in the fields.
The sun moves into clouds,
and then lightness comes again.

What were you thinking
as you exited this door?
How conflicted you must have felt.
Twenty-one-years-old, off to America,
leaving nine siblings and parents behind,
knowing you would never see them again.

From Athlone on the Shannon River, dead center of Ireland,
you walked and somehow made it to Southampton, England,
where you boarded the ship
Adriatic,
a word that means “dark city.”

You knew no one in the promised land of your imagination,
but you had courage and a dream.
Just a few belongings, I’m sure, and not much money.
Mostly you had hope.

I press my palm against
the stone wall,
just as you touched my head so many years ago.
I see you move from light into darkness and beyond.

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