Shanna McNair is Founder and Director of The Writer’s Hotel and Founding Editor and Publisher of The New Guard literary review and High Frequency Press. Shanna writes prose, poetry and scripts and is an award-winning journalist. She recently served as a RISCA Fiction Fellow Competition Judge, and as an Interdisciplinary Study Adviser at Lesley University. Her debut novel Soul Retrieval is forthcoming in 2025. Shanna lives and works in Maine.

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Ode to Nora

for Thomas Lynch

I don’t often smoke and can’t say I believe, but here
in Moveen facing the sea, I have a go at both. Here am I
with the late Nora Lynch, here in her cottage, measuring pulses.
Nora’s spirit gauzes the air like the slip smoke from the cigarette
she holds in a fireside photo. I am only human, Nora.
How you dip and curl and widen to sign the light.
How your long-eyed savior—less a Charlton Heston Jesus
than a Yeats Jesus—watches over the room, kitted out
with red bulb and cross. How your being, O Nora,
illuminates my trespasses.

Your cousin American cousin Thomas
gave me the blessing. Said “visit,” and visit over visitor,
I find and find. Thomas hid me your keys
and gave a charm’s worth of directions. One pass leads
to the next. In your narrow drive, Nora, the taxi man
insists tips are no good and watches me shake
your lock open, with a wave: and a “soon.”

Thomas’ rent, he asked only for writing. Give a poem.
A story. Tell what you see. Fight, flight, stay, keep,
undo, do. Alone I hear Thomas too, “This is for you, this
is for us. This is this.” He nudges as I unzip my cases,
niggling, teasing, talking, “You are a writer. You,”
he is saying,“are welcome.” The Irish chill
is buoyed by sun and comes in cradled waves,
the way that life moves separate from thought.
I am reassured but must catch up, catch up, catch up,
the one-two-three waltz (or the three-four yes jig) of the Irish must.

“Look for the book,” Thomas says, “find your fellows,
their passages are inked,” and again, there’s his laugh—
I open a beer. Alone with you Lynches, a chill from your
floor, pacing the miracle flat sides of the cottage’s
colossal floor stones, drawn up from somewhere middle
earth. As much a mystery of proportion and science
as the Newgrange tomb or the Pyramids of Giza.

I worry I don’t have the goods. I’m superstitious
and the peat will not light. The wind shakes terrible
thunders and boils, fearsome as Gaelic in the mouth
of a Monseigneur. The cottage unmoves. It is made
of permanence. Solid as a Celt. Fitted as a bite.
I snap vain matches and tell the grate I’m an American Scot,
born on Battle Of The Boyne day, but that I wish for Irish, too.
The Barmbrack bricks yield in slow earth kindles
as shore cold submits to warmth, a hot whiskey glass keeling my palms.

There are photographs of Thomas the American—also Thomas
the Irish—come to find old Nora on a song of River Shannon
with a 70s collar. Tom’s eyes glance the lens ecstatic, as
his witsome Nora, matter-of-fact, stamps a trail in his soul back to the ancients.

In the morning, sun fiddles through raindance trees. I smoke polite—
a piece of trouble outside with the donkeys and bright flower pots.
Next door’s stallion eats my apples but not my pears. Nora’s old neighbor
strolls up slow over the grass to the paddock to tell me
I’m feeding his blood horse stud, who’s been “vexing the mares.”
He pats the wet muzzle and squints his sharp, otherworld blue
eyes at me. He knew Nora. She was a good farmer. He works her land
with a keen private reverence, told with hands thick as love.

Over Clare eggs and beans (salted and white pepper) I hear bird shrieks
in separate kitchen windows. Two fledgling browns. They let me catch them:
one in a pint glass, the other in a colander. A cliché of American saving.
I think of the blistering market crash and a string of presidents I did not vote for.
And how I serve as reminder and symbol of hollowy losses. How the birds are
frightened. Oh Nora, do you feel me set them free? Do you hear the long
whinny carry into the fog? Oh Nora, dear Lynches, dear Ireland:
I can promise you’ll teach poetry to my questions.

I pull on a raincoat and trek out, past this community
knowing nothing of the worries, knowing nothing of the joys,
only taking a keyhole’s-worth for sense; a scrap of grass, a sample
of sky. A blundering anthropologist. Two sets fingers, reaching
and releasing. Two legs footing the miles upon miles to Kilkee-town
and back. A jolly dog follows until it is too much for him. I wonder
if the ancestors Lynch walked until they could walk no more,
wearily staving a final flag Moveen West, in a fit of will, well apart.

And here comes that dog. A waggling sentinel. I play sheep and he herds
me through pastures, up, up and now we are going past hornless bulls
staring over fallen stone fences. The dog insists, keep coming.
Come. He’s not bluffing. This is serious.

And oh, past a single string of electric wire how sudden the field breaks
into the Diamond Cliffs, quick as decision, sure as death
and humus and limestone. Far down, the water claps and busts.
I would pray if it gave enough to the misty emergent
pliant horizon where I am only my own exclamation
point in the escaping beauty held only by imagination
or some way of feeling, done without eyes. There are bristling daisies
that smell like marijuana and clusters of happy
black slugs. I pick a purple sea holly. The purple sea holly
picks me. I am a conduit found by its circuit. I am dead gone joy.
I mind-fly, jumping into forever, never to hit the rocks below.
Finally I wander back over the hillock into the sways
of rosehips and clover, a lost art. The dog is gone.

Another road haunts my mind: what of the recession houses?
Nora would have hidden a gawk with a hum-hum-hum, chaining by
on her wide, high nelly bicycle. She’d whisper, they’re gingerbreaders
and stare, because the houses glow like holograms on plots of Styrofoam.
Nora, you tell how the white collars are lethal as white spirits,
as consuming as The Salt, witching inward from the ocean.

Nora, she’s reminding me she’s resting. She says her Tom-son
knows things. Won the lawyer’s blunt fight, saved the family acres
and paid that ridiculous water bill after the passing.
Nora says: and that’s enough of this talk, now,
and I’m in heaven, thank you very much.

My own bike’s been wheeling. I move from cottage
to town, following her pace. I talk to the butcher, who knew her,
the postman stopping to ask who I might be, who knows Tom.
The grocer has no answers, the bartender’s uncle has a big opinion.
“A gossip,” “A lady,” “A Christian,” “A dear.” Tom’s house is dubbed
“The Poet’s House,” and I am not the first young American there.
They know me. My modern bike speeds on the hills in the sun
and the moon and the rain. I am transparent as history and cloying
as a drunkard. My ignorance saves me. They let me in.

Nora’s sits on the third hill across from a farm, her gate yielding
for the lane. Green trim and whitewash and a cement plaque, “Nora’s”
made by Tom—the undertaker and the poet—affixed between window and door.
Meanwhile sweetbriar’s passing notes to fuchsia through laces of wily green
a’ sway and a’ pop and agog and a’ bee with ripening elderberry.
Nora’s hand treated each blossom and stem to the secret of being.

My silence to Nora’s, I dare not doubt. Those who knew her say
she spoke for Ireland. I lean in with my listening ear as holy water runs and
runs over the roof opening the ghost and Nora tells me stories
from people to give back to people thatch upon thatch. She calls me “child.”
Ha-ha’s my evening coffee. Tells me about a country run on cream and defending it
all with hunger and music and guns. And more, she adds, because she
doesn’t subtract, and never you mind her railcar worth of suitors.

I am not worthy of Nora Lynch. Worthy of The Poet’s House.
I am not a clear specimen. I am untidy and wasteful.
I am love without enough purpose. Desire without enough truth.
Care without enough gentleness. Ego with little confidence.

Nora takes out a tenner packet and taking a drag for your man
makes a cross for me, just in case. She laughs and it is like singing
the sound carries over my mortal yen in the dark, an air of the whole mossy mosaic—
the striated escarpments, the lowing cows saying “oh no, oh no”
the whorls of heathery nettle, the weather-sculpted ivy and pine, the gamboling
animal dales that spill into endlessly bucking rock-turned waves;
the counties and all their proud centuries apart and together, please
nobody goes orphaned or starved; the pipers, the writers, the painters,
the jigs, the pubs, the craic, the church and the saints.

Searching the night Nora tells me her word not a word for shooting
star. She hides it in a dream. A prayer for our perfect human family.
I belong to this longing. She swears me to the secret place, here
where I have spread my pallet on the floor of Ireland.