MAP I In six-inch scale, the Mayo baronies Cover half the wall above my couch. Bog and mountain, tarn and cascade: I trace These abrupt crazed contours where the gannet sweeps Round rock and cliff, the bay below groaning, the wind Cudgelling the coarse grass flat as it drives inland. Here, on the narrow slope between crags and sea, Clan fought clan, the misty cliffs over them, Searock a false step below, and the Atlantic gale Drumming their shields with shafts of rain. No peace Ever visits that shore; no worth in that stony ground. II Papers everywhere -- piled onto tables and shelves -- Accounts marked overdue, old magazines, failed poems. A room occupied too long,. Inertia. I should Give up scanning the map, prone here on the couch, And like my father take rootless flight. He was an inconstant collector -- Spode jugs, The 'Complete Works of George Moore,' trout flies -- Fads, pawned off in time, to pay for new caprices. In his last place, the apartment in Beirut, He spread a dozen Persian rugs, overlapping each other, Auctioned off after his death. I held on to His bronze gesturing Shiva, with his little smile. Has ancestral greed driven us over the earth ... ? III Was it greed for possession of these salty crags That drove them at each other, wave after wave, Yelling and stumbling through bulrushes and mire Between Achill and the Bellacorick marsh? No one records the outcome, no one knows the victor: 'Place of Great Slaughter,' the name in Irish on the map. When the blighted stalks Lay cracked and brown above The harrow-rows, the lean Poets stopping their singing By the blackened hearth and sought The exile ship in the cove, Or death released them from Mourning the pestilence That shadowed every face, And rage against the tyrant Whose greed fostered famine Rattled in their throats. IV Rage swept them across the Vistula, Danube, Elbe, Before they had names for rivers. They hammered Images into bronze and gold to shield them For the crossing to the Isles of Bliss they dreamt Beyond the storms. Now they have spanned oceans And given their names to places they stayed in Hardly long enough to light a fire or dig a grave. My father learned to navigate the old way, By the stars -- could fly a course From Ganges to Euphrates -- knew half the globe From the air. The Ides of March: taking off From Tehran, his plane crashed at the edge Of a place that is called in Persian 'Desert of Salt.' "Twenty thousand feet above the Aegean, Setting course for Alexandria ... If you can get to Basel I can meet you And take you on to Beirut." His letter folded Round the cash for the fare, but I bought instead A box of secondhand books, and stayed home In a littered room, to doze to Haydn; to put down The pen, lost for words, considering the map, The pibroch sounding, the warriors shouting. The gannet settles On a narrow ledge Between rowdy waves And rain-laden clouds. On the slope of great slaughter A mountain ash raises Its one stricken limb. -- James J. McAuley, in memory of his father, Capt. J. Noel McAuley, 1908-1963.