Irish Blood, American Heart

tinkers

Somewhere in the peripheral vision of my family’s ancestry
is Ireland, green and stony and a reflection of its own seas: 
prolific. Somewhere, in the back of my father’s father’s father’s
mind, the droning and incomprehensible sermon
of his motherland--somewhere, it left. It exited and left its crumbs
on the mat of the front door, and beckoned him to do the same.
My father’s father, I imagine, could see these same seas
that had haunted his own father for now uncountable decades.
They were ready--even he, as a small child on a boat travelling to
America--for change, that one-syllable absurdity that brings about
the worst in all people. My great-grandfather, feeling the boat’s 
hideous breeze across his back, would have shouted at my 
grandfather. He would have screamed and moaned and
shrieked of pure Irish torment until my grandfather’s young
tears dripped into the ruthless ocean. Perhaps this is why
my grandfather never once in his lifetime went on a boat
again. Perhaps this is why, in an act of youthful defiance that 
never quite faded away, my father takes his own family, including 
me, on a yearly fishing trip off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. Perhaps
this is why I--once last summer and then again in a dream--saw
slick-scaled striped bass flop wildly into view and then quickly
disappear, covered by an oily film laid down
by the sun, into the cerulean sea.