Unquiet flows the Tolka

Bridge of Tolka, Drumcondra Park, spelter baluster, pewter spate. Spectre of Swan's liturgy, philtre of Stac's refrain, and peroxide Ida, acid exchange student, your college green a prairie to our Botanics. You sexed me with a buttercup, highly, and yogi-sat akimbo. Oh Ida, we shoulda. I'da.

Where are you now, unbanked in Ohio, divorced in Union City? Do men put their words into your mouth in Idaho? Are you a mother of succour or did you die purple hearted by the tracks in Maine?

I'll seek you high and low in Isle au Haut, I'll trade Manhattan for rosary beads and pray for an apparition, I'll drop into every dive from Atlantic City to shining Z, and go over Niagara in a glass-bottomed boat, looking for my Tolka naiad.

But should all peroxide Ida's look the same, I'll find out what martinis are and drink them dry, I'll down firewater without reservation in the Indian nations, I'll find a night door and wait for you there as longing, unquiet as the Tolka flows.

--
Stephen Moran
Dublin pictures by Harry Lemon

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