Dave's Fiction Warehouse

A coastal trail near Ardmore. W e’re going to Ireland in a few days. It’ll be our third time there. Mostly we’re going because a few months ago we got a killer deal on round-trip tickets between Seattle and Dublin. How cheap? You don't want to know. Ever been? It’s a pretty easy place to be a tourist. Sunshine is rare, but the people are generally friendly and that accent makes them seem even more so. They don’t yet hate Americans. Few places in Ireland are very crowded. That has become my primary condition for traveling anywhere these days. I always feel a bit uneasy before a trip abroad. I like being in a new place, but I loathe the process of getting there when air travel is involved.  There’s a poem by Derek Walcott that I always think of the night before traveling. “Tomorrow, Tomorrow.” I’ll post it here from memory; my apologies if the wording and punctuation is not precise: I remember the cities I have never seen, exactly. Silver-veined Venice. Leningrad, with its toffee-twi...

This month's poetry selection is not really a poem, but the half-remembered fragment of a poem. I came across it a decade ago while at work, and printed it out and memorized as much of it as I could. Now the printout is long gone, and my memory isn't much of a backup system. The poem, I'm pretty sure, is called "Song on Turning 70." It's by John Hall Wheelock, and even the power of Google has been insufficient to recover the complete work. Guess it's time for a trip to the library. My apologies to readers -- and to the estate of Mr. Wheelock -- for the words and line breaks I have inevitably gotten wrong: Shall not a man sing as the night comes on? Great night, hold back a little longer yet the mountainous black waters of darkness from this shore, this island garden, this paradisal spot the haunt of love and pain which we must leave, whether we would or not and where we shall not come again. More time. Oh, but a little more ... Does that ring a bell with ...