Pissing On The Blarney Stone
Pissing on the Blarney Stone
Jan Becker
Leona sends me emails from Scotland.
Where she is the modern model of femininity
among the boys drinking whiskey in the bars.
Her emails say she is starting to embrace
the new culture
of life from a backpack
and youth hostels with dorm rooms
crowded with armpits and nose hairs,
falling asleep to a symphony of foreign snores.
She is a gypsy again
and she doesn’t mention Dave, the vegan rush fan
who is waiting just outside of Boston
growing thin in her absence.
She writes instead of the Scottish men
and Nepalese men who shower her with affection,
ask her to marry them in public Dublin
under the street lights.
Men dripping with diamond rings and promises.
Leona writes me from Limerick
that she couldn’t kiss the Blarney Stone,
because the Irish locals piss on it.
The only thing I asked her to do in Ireland was kiss that stone for me.
It is like when we went to Plymouth Rock, and the reproduction Mayflower,
And after wanting to see the rock for so long,
there it was, sitting in the Harbor painted with a red swastika.
and the tourists all took their pictures home to foreign countries
and faraway towns.
But my fingers would not press the shutter button,
and my photos were undeveloped.
I only took pictures of the Pilgrim graveyards
where the colonists buried their dead the first winter
in a place where the Indians could not count the Pilgrim dead.
Leona will come back from this trip,
having read the new theories that
Atlantis was actually Ireland that I mailed to her.
Her hips will swivel with experience
from the stares of British boys
with bad teeth
in air so thick with whiskey farts
that the oldest maid
suddenly appears to be a princess.
and the Blarney stone will shrink
from not having touched her lips
while she was alive and vibrant
and all the boys loved her.
And I know,
that if I ever make the trip to Plymouth or to Cork,
I will lick both rocks
with my tongue,
I swear,
if I ever travel to Plymouth, or to Cork,
I will soul kiss both stones,
and give them a tourist to remember.