THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE

 

THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE

THE LAKE ISLE

       I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping, with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
—W. 

I flew into Dublin, smuggling the urn of Eoin’s ashes in my suitcase. I had no idea if there
were international laws—or Irish laws—about transporting the dead and decided I didn’t
want to know. My suitcase was waiting for me at the baggage claim, and I double-checked to
make sure the urn hadn’t been confiscated before renting a car to drive northwest to Sligo,
where I would stay for a few days while I explored nearby Dromahair. I hadn’t adequately
prepared myself to drive on the wrong side of the road and spent much of the three-hour
journey to Sligo weaving across the road and screaming in terror, unable to enjoy the
landscape for fear I would miss a sign or hit an oncoming car.
I rarely drove in Manhattan; there was no reason to own a car. But Eoin had insisted I
learn how and get a driver’s license. He said freedom was the ability to go wherever your
heart called, and growing up, we’d driven up and down the East Coast on little vacations and
adventures. The summer I turned sixteen, we spent July crossing the entire United States,
starting in Brooklyn and ending in Los Angeles. That is when I learned to drive, traversing
long stretches of highway between small towns that I would never see again. Over rolling
hills, through the red cliffs of the West, across the expanse of nothing and everything with
Eoin at my side.
I’d memorized “Baile and Aillinn” by Yeats as we drove, a narrative poem filled with
legend and longing, death and trickery, and love that transcended life. Eoin had held the dogeared
copy of Yeats’s poetry, listening to me stumble through lines, gently correcting me,
and helping me pronounce the Gaelic names of the old legends until I could deliver each line
and verse like I had lived it. I had a passion for Yeats, who was obsessed with the actress
Maud Gonne, who gave her love to a revolutionary instead. Eoin let me ramble on about
things I thought I understood—but only romanticized—like philosophy and politics and Irish
nationalism. Someday, I told him, I wanted to write a novel set in Ireland during the Rising
of 1916.
“Tragedy makes for great stories, but I’d much rather your story—the one you live, not
the ones you write—be filled with joy. Don’t revel in tragedy, Annie. Rejoice in love

THE LAKE ISLETHE LAKE ISLE 

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