Goodby To Prometheus

I am cutting ties that I knotted to a faraway soil. Exiled no longer at the tiller of a long beached fishing boat that bobs only on the legends of ancient waves. Those fluent in soul-breathing, the Celtic poets, those wind-chiming lyricists, are pulling me to the bottom of Lake Erie where drowned sea-captains still quote what the Irish once wrote. And here’s me, even today caught by the mouth from their linguistic fishhooks yet cutting myself away. I am a handmade citizen of a land that is my own meat and gristle, a subsoil am I and my father and mother the grubbing worm and the turtle dove. Still Irish, but rootless with no anchor in Galway Bay. I have cut the trap lines become a jobbing teller of tall tales, not a keeper of any traditions planted by hands not of my own. And if once in a while I lapse into the sod and bog-speak of my unlearned brethren it is no literary affectation of a better education, for I remain this common creature determined to be tied to a smaller rock of my own choosing.