I'd gone back to Dublin with the explicit intention of stalking Seamus
Heaney. I had read his poems in college and thus felt that I was an
expert on understanding Seamus Heaney and so I moved hundreds of miles
to be able to talk with him. At night, I lay awake watching the paint
move on my ceiling while whispering again and again, Seamus Heaney,
Seamus Heaney.
I'd become obsessed with the idea of holograms. I had a package of
glitter stickers that moved in the lamplight when I shifted them in my
hands. Merman undulating in moonlight shadow. A shimmer one moment, a
fading afterthought toward somewhere else the next. Now you see her,
now you don't. Now you see her, now she don't.
In the mornings, I would wonder what it would take for anything to
happen. So I would ask Seamus Heaney, how do I get back the look a man
gave me one night in secret? How do I get him to do it again, how do I
write a poem, how do I do, I do, Hell already wanted me, I could
hear it, undulating like a slow march, there were horns. This man was taking
it back, this man, and I would lie on the floor until it became sand, and I would
sink and there would be unspeakable -- every grain of sand was Seamus
Heaney, and I could write a painting about that look on each grain and
you would be gone and I would be sinking sinking sinking sink.
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