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Thomas Rabbitt
The Bones of Temple Jarlath
. . . there you shall build your oratory, for God
wills that there shall be the place of your resurrection, and many shall
arise in glory in the same place along with you.
—St. Brendan the Navigator
In Tuam, in the west of Ireland, the wheel
Of Jarlath’s chariot broke, as Brendan, not yet
A saint, had foretold, so Jarlath hitched his ass
To the wreck and, as my friend Sean Walsh has said,
Went into Gilligans for a pint. History is the rest:
A great cathedral, now Protestant, and the sacred
School of Tuam, which sounds like tomb and should.
Young Brendan sent Jarlath two miles to the east
While he, the navigator in his ox-hide boat, sailed west—
Beyond the whale-road—to find for Holy Ireland America
And all that lebensraum the world could do without.
Meanwhile, back in Tuam, a drunk has made his home
In a tomb in Temple Jarlath. And aren’t the pubs abuzz
With the scandal of his desperate measures!
Because there was room, he said, for only one to sleep,
He took the long yellow bones and the toothy skull,
The fragile fingers and toes, vertebrae and broken ribs,
And dumped them in a skip. The relics lost. Lost!
Or would be, had they been Jarlath’s bones, those bones,
Those dry bones encased in silver and “translated”
In 1415 to Teampul na scrin beside the great cathedral.
So the town has found one drunk a proper house as well.
In Gilligans we shake our woozy heads. A house for him
To wreck and not pay rent, to burn the doors and floors
Against the coming winter’s cold. Just to ease our souls.
Yet who can account for the miracle? It’s been three days
And our holy drunk is sober, in a tie and drinking milk.
Sure, it won’t last, says Sean, who offered him a job
Digging potatoes. Let the fucker who hid them find them
Is what the saint said. Best to say nothing, Sean said.
Aye, said the doctor, and keep on saying it. Which might do,
If it weren’t for the missing bones and the miracle.
THOMAS RABBITT lives on a farm in the west of Ireland. His latest collection,
Prepositional Heaven, was published by River City Press.
“The Bones of Temple Jarlath” appears in our Summer
2001 issue.
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