Upon Hearing Amy Winehouse at St. James’ Church in Dingle

Grief without song could be any stone chapel built of loss

packed with aging villagers lulled reticent as rue

by a rote bell’s tongue, hemmed by iron gates and a yew

tree lurking mirthlessly beside a burial ground where moss-

patinaed spirits and earth angels gather round relic icons

of threadbare hand-me-down faith. You sit/kneel/stand on

your misericord like an eaten Job in the organ belly’s drone,

sorting your parents’ hoarded aggregate—clothes pawn

and charity shops won’t take, sewing kits, boxes of old

Polaroids of anonymous sepia-people you wouldn’t be here

without, file drawers of past taxes, uniforms from the war,

wedding dress, unworn shoes unfit for a holy soul ...

—and that’s just the tip, to say nil of unspeakable sins

in attic and basement. Macular shorebirds scan whitecaps

for questions the mind’s eye can alight: dim synapse

of a candlelit nave, musty kneelers, a deacon’s

chair from Suriname. Grief without song is wasted pain.

According to patron James, faith in works—in real acts

of creation—amplifies our part in salvation’s soundtrack

louder than wafers, wine or words of mumbled expiation

dissolved on penitent tongues. In your rusted anechoic

husk, your veins blood-thrum a rushing river-hymn,

an electric fence of nerves ticking in your cerebellum—

until silence clears its throat ... and from her first chthonic

tremolo it comes as no shock: how from Galway to Summerhill

churches are being repurposed as concert halls by clergy who swear

love’s lost call note still lingers, runic under the moored murmur

of all those services you sat unmoved through, the supernal

flatulence of organ bellows at last revised in fidelity rare

as a black velvet angel with spindly legs and mental hair,

her aqueous blues beguiling as the B-side of prayer

beside an ocean we couldn’t hear but always knew was there.