The Barnyard Resurrection of W.B. Yeats

A short story I wrote in 2020 after a research trip that led me to the grave of W.B. Yeats in Drumcliffe, Ireland, at the foot of the legendary mountain Ben Bulbin. It was a time in my life of chaotic growth and debilitating grief, and I was there in northwestern Ireland untangling sorrow from anger along the rain-drenched hillsides. This short story was a long-form rework of a poem I wrote while there called Yeats and I at Ben Bulbin. I've included that poem at the end.

Yeats lowered himself gently onto the damp stone bench. His hands were trembling. Stupefied, I lit a cigarette and passed it to him. I didn’t know if he smoked. He looked at it, then up at me, shrugged, and took it. Also, hang on, I don’t smoke. I don’t know where the cigarettes came from. I patted my jacket to check again. I smiled a little. It’s a bit funny when things just appear out of thin air in your pockets, or outside their own graves. Things had been appearing in my pockets all week, so I wasn’t as shocked as I should have been. William looked shocked, but then again, William had been dead for eighty years.

“Bumpy ride?” I asked.

No reply. He just sat there, looking at the cigarette and breathing heavily. I had no idea what to say. Would he want to know about the world since he’d died? What had become of it? Oof, big ask. There wasn’t enough time to catch him up on the status of our dying planet, and I certainly wasn’t a worthy ambassador. Maybe just a stroll instead, after all, there was a gift shop nearby. “Any special requests as a first-thing-to-do-after-magical-resurrection?” I asked.

“Fuck off.”

Wow. Not the first words I would have expected from a ghost, but admittedly this was my first ghost. “Ohhhh-kay.” I wasn’t making headway. Awkward silence. “Wanna check out your headstone? Check if they got your quote right? It’s just around the corner.” Again, no answer. I was getting anxious. I should warn you now that I say stupid things when I get anxious. “Did you know that they kept your bones in France for nine years before bringing them to Drumcliff?” Ugh, stupid.

Yeats turned his head up and looked at me, confused. His eyes were clear and misted. I thought I saw tears in them, but his body was still about ten percent transparent so it very well could have been the puddle behind him. I’m not an expert on the emotional fortitude of ghosts. Anyway, he turned to look back across the cemetery grounds.

“It’s that dark one over there by the sidewalk.” I pointed.

“Drumcliff,” he sighed at last and squinted his eyes up at the chapel spire. “so, they did bring me home.”

“Yeah.” I was, well, yeah. “The war kept your remains in France for a while.” I didn’t know what else to say. God it was awkward. How do you explain the future to someone when it’s your own past?

“This is new to me, young man.” Yeats perked up a bit. “Can you explain how it has come to pass that I am here, at Drumcliff, and by all accounts un-dead?” he stood up slowly, bracing his lower back the way tired grandfathers do. “Did Lovecraft’s people get to you?”

“I…” I started, but hang on just a second. “Wait… Was that a joke?”

A corner turned up on Yeats’s stiff lip and few teeth poked through. His head dropped and few curls of his cat-black hair fell over his glasses. Did they bury him in his glasses?

“Did they bury you in your glasses?” Oops, out loud.
Yeats gave me a side glance and finally took a careful drag off the cigarette. I could tell by the way his eyebrows raised that he was sort of half-surprised and a bit smug about having a cigarette. I see it on people’s faces all the time. Slowly killing yourself is cool. Funny. Yeats, still human. Well, in the cool sense. He gave me another look like he could tell I was gawking and took another drag. Damn, he was a natural. So cool. Also, so dead.

“Cool.” I said.

Yeah, I know, shut up.

“So, out with it, son.” It seemed like he was getting his charm back, or maybe just impatience. “I’m no stranger to the Sidhe realm, and cast my share of magic spells. Who brought me back? I’d like to know how, and particularly why.” 

I didn’t have time to tell him the whole story. I’ll explain that later, but I’ll tell you for now: I came to Ireland to research W.B. Yeats and his connection to Irish folklore. I also came to Ireland looking for faeries. Not Tinkerbell, and not those put-a-tiny-door-at-the-base-of-a-tree variety, I mean the real fae folk. The gentry, the ‘good people’ (they don’t like to be talked down about), the Sidhe, as Yeats just named. Anyway, it was in County Sligo I planned to ask the faeries for help with something personal because I was already in Ireland and god dammit I’m rambling and not getting to the point. Okay. Here it is: I took a stone from Queen Maeve’s cairn and threw it down a holy well in a location I shouldn’t disclose. I thought it was symbolic, but I had no real sense of ritual or the superstitions of Ireland. Reckless, I’ll admit. That night I was visited in a dream by a ghostly glowing horse. It chased me up the hill of an ancient burial tomb and I climbed inside the doorway to escape. Inside, the darkness gave way to a shimmering underworld with dancing beings made of pure light and one of them approached me and told me I was welcome there for eternity and offered me some fruit. I told her? him? them? that I still had things undone in the world above - difficult things – and that I didn’t think I’d be happy until I did them, and also that I wasn’t really feeling hungry. The beings understood my unfinished business, and told me that I could bring someone back with me for one day to help. They said it could be anybody. I woke up after that and got some coffee and went about my day driving north of Sligo to Drumcliff to hike around the mountain called Ben Bulben. When I stopped at the cemetery nearby to see Yeats’s grave, I remembered the dream, and jokingly thought the words ‘I wish Yeats was here’ and boom, a gust of wind came and there he was. The end.

“I wished you back.” was the short version I gave him.

He looked at me quizzically, like he was waiting for a more detailed explanation. Very intuitive guy, this Yeats. But after another puff, he just nodded slowly and, “Okay” was it.

“I need your help with something,” I said, trying to move past the weirdness.

He looked me over, and then hardened his gaze suspiciously. “I can see a bit of my old self in you… sad, lost.” He stamped the cigarette out on the stone next to him and looked back at me. “Is there some great quest you’re tasked to complete? Are we to fight monsters?” he said sarcastically.

I shook my head. “Just for the day.” I said, trying to sound relaxed. It was hard to look at him.

“What ever could you need me for?” He was eye-balling me. “A love poem? Some romantic gesture that could only be aided by yours truly?” He looked intensely in my eyes and suddenly I found myself paralyzed. He shook his head and looked away and I felt my body return. Ghost powers. “No, that’s not it… hmmm… did you lose something only a ghost could find?”

I felt cold and clammy from his look. “No. Well, sort of, but…” I cleared my throat. “No. I actually need to ask you about faeries.” 

“Ha!” he blurted out, wagging a finger in the air. “The age-old question about the good people lives on… I’d warn you now, though.” Cryptic, this guy Yeats. He looked back at me with a clever expression. “They say that proof of magic is the death of mystery, so I have some reluctance…” He looked down and felt his own chest, smoothing out his dusty coat. “Besides, am I not evidence enough of life beyond your own understanding?”

“I wasn’t expecting ghosts too.” I said in clarification. “But this does make things… easier, I suppose?” I shoved my hands in my pockets and discovered a small ragged stone in each. I held them up and looked at them.

Curious, Yeats came over to see what I’d found. Nodding, he pointed at them. “Those are calling cards of the fae folk.” One of the rocks was the shape of a, well, regular rock I guess. Totally normal. The other one was shaped a bit like an animal jaw, but still just a rock. “Two clues, those. Like puzzle pieces that fit something bigger. Something inside you. I’ve got buckets of them back at Ballylee.” He stopped just then as if to feel the weight of that word. Ballylee. I was certain I could feel him thinking about it. That tower. That awful place. I could feel how he was feeling about it. He waved the thought away. “They’ll be around soon enough.” he assured me, and turned away in perfect foreshadowing fashion. All writers do this. Just watch one next time, you’ll see.

“Would you walk Ben Bulben with me?” I asked in earnest, putting the stones back in my pockets. “I have questions about the beginning of the chapter Kidnappers from your book The Celtic Twilight.”

“Ahh, that old rubbish…” He sauntered over to his own gravestone and then looked up toward the ragged plateau of Ben Bulben looming just east over the Chapel grounds. Its flat top was shrouded in rain clouds, casting an unwelcoming shadow down the slopes at its westernmost point. The mountain was like an axehead buried in the land, dropped by some giant of the old days, and Yeats’s faded silhouette stood in sharp contrast against the misty looming cliffside. I’m just spit-balling here, the mountain looked really awesome is what I’m trying to say. I’d also say it felt like Yeats was thinking for me, like his thoughts were intertwining with mine about the view and the weight of the moment. He wasn’t wrong. He paused, and then in an eerie cadence, began, “A little north of the town of Sligo, on the southern side of Ben Bulben, some hundreds of feet above the plain, is a small white square in the limestone.” Holy shit, he was reciting it. “… No mortal has ever touched it with his hand; no sheep or goat has ever browsed grass beside it. There is no more inaccessible place upon the earth, and few more encircled by awe to the deep considering. It is the door of faery-land. In the middle of night it swings open, and the unearthly troop rushes out.” He looked back at me with the kind of self-satisfaction that makes others groan. It was glorious. “What of it?” he asked.

I caught my breath and tried to explain my fascination with his writing about faeries and all the stories he had collected in his early years about bell-ringing demons and disappearing drunkards and strange dancing children at twilight. I knew he’d been collecting those stories as a means of salvaging some of the ‘old ways’ of the Irish, some kind of locality to their beliefs and superstitions, but I wanted to know why he was so fascinated by them. Any attempt to preserve the mythology of a disappearing ancient culture is an unquestionably noble thing, but to write about diminutive immortal elves living en masse under the hillsides of rural Ireland is something worth asking more about.

“Well, honestly, they were mostly just fun stories to hear.” He smirked. “It’s not every day you get to witness a group of burly Connaught men recount in astonishing detail how they ran screeching down the roadside, chased by a demonic, long-legged swine.” He chuckled and rubbed the back of his sleeve.

 “Did you believe their stories, or were they always just stories to you?”

“That’s the big question isn’t it…” He replied, and stood pensive for a moment. “What are stories, really? The past attempting to shape the future? I suppose it’s hard to believe a story about a spectral woman in a white dress crossing a field at night wielding a sword, but honestly, they weren’t that uncommon in my day.” He shot me a juvenile, knowing look. I rolled my eyes. He continued, “But men turning into bat-winged devils and cousins returning to their village a century later having not seemingly aged a day is hard to corroborate, let alone derive some culturally allegorical significance from.”

“You don’t think the stories of missing children were on account of magic? You don’t believe in Niamh calling them ‘away, come away?’” I felt clever reciting his poetry back to him. It didn’t get the reaction I was hoping for.

 “I think they went somewhere, and the thought of them joining a merry band of elves under the cover of darkness is a romantic, and preferable explanation to the alternative.”

“What’s the alternative?” I asked.

“That they were simply taken by someone else, or done-in by plague, or beaten beyond saving and buried in the field.” He chewed on his lip at the thought. “Really any other reason for a child disappearing is ghastly in contrast to mischief that leads to an everlasting life of dancing and feasting, even if you’ll never see them again.”

I cringed. “Harsh, don’t you think?” Yeats cocked his head at me.

“Would you rather believe that humans are evil by nature, or that we are the victims of malevolent forces beyond our control? I think most prefer the latter.” Again, harsh, but good point.

“So do you believe them? The stories? The kidnappings? The fae folk?”

He shook his head in distaste. “Of course not.”

“Then why so much effort to publish all those stories? All those places? Countless people have gone to see them. Hell, I have a map in the car with a dozen or more sites flagged to visit just this week.” I wanted more than that.

“‘Hell’ indeed… Now there’s a valiant reason for stomping up the Carrowkeel mounds in a thunderstorm.” He smiled. “People want a pilgrimage more than they want to find their own way.”

“Meaning…?” I asked.

“Superstition has always been a cure for introspection.” He said, holding his palms up.

“You don’t think it’s worth seeing the places you write about? The hillsides? The graves?”

Yeats rubbed his hand across the top of his own greying headstone. “It’s been said one should only visit a grave if they intend to leave something in it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” It felt like he was in my head, tinkering around.

“Oh, nothing.” He looked up at me for a moment the way a mischievous child checks to see if their parent is watching. He changed the subject. “So, we’re here in Drumcliff... The mighty ridge of Ben Bulben lies at your doorstep. A mountain drenched in stories of the fae folk. What would you like to know?”

I perked up a bit. “Excellent!” I rummaged around my thoughts on his Kidnappers. “Okay, first question: the ‘small white square in the limestone’ …can you take me to it?”

“No.”

“Hmm… Okay, second question: does it exist?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. Third question: can you at least point it out?”

“Of course,” he said, turning toward the mountain. He lifted his arm and pointed out at the southern slope. I scrambled over to him to trace the line of his outstretched arm. Not much help. “It’s up there.”

“Why won’t you take me to it?” I asked impatiently.

“Why would you want to find it?” He replied. I wasn’t sure what he meant.

“I came all this way looking for the sites you wrote about. Ben Bulben, Drumahair, Knocknarea. I wanted to find something. You left everyone clues.”

“Clues? You mean you want to tour those places? Check them off a list? What for?” He looked disappointed. “Is this some sort of academic scavenger’s hunt you’ve come here for? You certainly don’t need me for that, you’ve already got my book.” He paced around his headstone. “Besides, it would ruin the mystery, wouldn’t it?”

“How do you figure?” I asked.

“Sometimes the stories are more captivating than their reality.” Surely this one was.

“So, you do believe the stories!” I countered.

“I see what you’re getting at.” He said, wagging his finger at me again. “Okay, I’ll bite. Ask me more.”

“Okay!” I was getting excited. I get off track when I get excited. “Okay… the red-hatted riders you mentioned…”

“…yes?” He sounded worried.

“Do they actually wear red hats?”

“…”

“Ok, stupid question. Sorry.” Yes, very stupid. “Okay… umm…. Oh! Alright, can you tell me about what happens when they come out of the limestone doorway?”

“Well, they come bounding, springing, crawling out. Like flocks, like prides, like hordes. Joyous and wretched little things.” I had goosebumps. “They skip and sing, mostly joyful melodies, but layered and haunting in a kind of way. A bit like an echo.”

“What do they do when they get down the hillside?”

“They’re hard to spot, but one will typically steal livestock, another will go to the nearest farm field and break the plough. One very well might come down here and dance on these gravestones, maybe piss in the holy well.” He smiled and looked down at his own grave. “They cause mischief to take revenge.”

 “For what?”

“For their lands being taken. They were banished, forced underground long ago.”

“Do they come every night?”

“Every night.” He eyed me again and raised his brow for emphasis. “And mortals found are mortals taken.”

This was sounding like a poem. Too familiar. “Are you reciting something I haven’t read?”

“Perhaps one that never made the cut.” He grinned, and swung around back toward the mountain, moseying along the path. “So they take mortals away… A fortnight for the Sally washing at the spring, Ten years for the gleeman napping roadside. A century for the child rolling on the lawn, nevermore for the lost one on the hill.”

Okay, Poe. Easy on the melodrama. “And what if they found me?” I asked, feigning humour.

“Time, and you, will vanish, come away.” He paused and looked through his ghostly hand. “And cares away, so far away. Feasted, forgotten, as a dream upon waking.” He looked back intently. “Your mind, your lives, your loves…” He leaned in. “The cliff, the riverside, the tomb. Lost.” He was in my head. He knew about the old bridge, the dolmens, the cairns. He knew about the day I spent on Knocknashee.

“Lost?” I asked.

“Until returned.”

“When?”

“You cannot know.”

I needed to know.

The day was waning and the face of Ben Bulben was lit in a golden fire. A rainbow cut a soft arc down from the blue-grey blanket of clouds still wrapping the peak and settled in a tree on the far side of the adjacent pasture. Neon-spangled sheep grazed in the sideways sun on the easy slope to the cliff face, their wool hanging in muddy rivulets like old mops brushing the heather. I wasn’t finished with my questions, but I didn’t know what to ask. Something between us shifted, as if we had come to know each other better without adequate conversation, and we both sat along the concrete wall staring at the hillside. It was quiet, but Yeats seemed impatient. Maybe he knew his time was dwindling. Finally, he broke the silence.

“I do not remember much of the time in between my death and now.” He said. “I don’t know where I was, but I do know I was at peace. You broke that peace bringing me back to this place, to these memories. I’d thank you for the opportunity to see it again, if it was something I wanted.” Yeats turned to me, looking more frustrated. “Why did you summon me? Honestly. What do you really need from me?” Now it was him that wanted answers – ones I didn’t feel like sharing.

“You told us where magic lived, you practically handed us the map. I wanted to find those places and… and, I guess…” This was going to take explaining I wasn’t prepared for.

“And what? Talk to the faeries? You think they’d grant you everlasting life, or dance you into a dream or something?” He was getting close. He shook his head slowly, bewildered. “What sick determination possesses you so that you’d leap into necromancy?”

“I didn’t. This whole thing was an accident. I’m just…” I didn’t want to say.

His eyelids thinned at me and he leaned in. “Don’t want to say what?” Great. Can he hear my thoughts?

He nodded. Fuck.

“There’s a darkness in you. Out with it now.”

The first brick fell. My walls were crumbling a little. “I can’t put it in words.” I said, trying to excuse myself.

“There are words for everything, even the most unimaginable. Try.”

“That’s it.” I said. That wasn’t it.

Please don’t make me say it. Let’s go back to the book and the research. “Can’t you just tell me about the faeries? Won’t that be enough?” I could feel my body tensing. I was shrinking. “I mean, I didn’t ask for this, I didn’t mean to bring you back from the dead, I don’t really need you. It’s just a work project.” Was this working? It definitely wasn’t working. “I’m just here to follow your book and write about my trip. Maybe find a pot-o-gold or two.” I should have told you earlier that I use humour to cover up a deep sadness and hopelessness that I cannot seem to process, but we probably all do that. At least that’s what my therapist says. I have my teacher’s union to thank for those extended therapy benefits. Henry is our representative, well, was our represe- why the fuck was I thinking of my teachers union now?

“That’s it.” I said. That still wasn’t it.

“That certainly is not it.” He replied, his face as exhausted as my argument.

I couldn’t tell him. I just couldn’t. I don’t think I could tell anyone.

“Okay then,” he finally said and stood up. “I’m just going to go back to wherever I materialized from and take my glasses with me back to the afterlife. The everlasting melancholy of those in search of the Sidhe shall indeed live on. Thank you for this enlightening afternoon here at my final resting place.” Yeats waved a tired hand back at me and began walking toward the chapel. I could see the brass handles of the arching doors glint in the sun through his barely-transparent body. He seemed to be fading more. Shame was clawing its way through my stomach, dangerously close to my throat. Ohp, there it is.

“Wait!” William… or W.B.? William-Butler? Fuck I don’t know. “Yeats!” I was grasping for it. He stopped at the top step and looked back at me with that lasting tired expression.

“I…” The words weren’t coming. “You… you didn’t…” ugh, here we go again, “You didn’t materialize in the chapel…” I pointed to a yellowing limestone block to his left. “It was over there.” Okay. Gods please just strike me down I am such a piece of–

“Thank you, dear boy, and Godspeed finding the actual grave you seek.” He replied, and trod heavily down the worn steps away from the chapel.

Well played, Yeats. His dusty oxfords clopped on the fieldstones like the ticking of a massive clock. The moment felt like a lifetime.

“I didn’t want to worry anyone, you know...” I called at last. Well, here’s something I didn’t expect to be saying. “I just wanted to be rid of it.”

Yeats stopped and looked over his shoulder. “Rid of what?”

“All of it.” It was the best I could do. It was a long list. “Those stories about people disappearing, being taken by the Sidhe to live forever in the underworld. I just wanted to be free of the worry, free of the shitstorm of humanity. Rid of it.” There it was. There’s the thing I was looking for. “I just thought… I just thought I could come here, and they would…” I thought I felt a raindrop hit my cheek.

 “Kidnap you?” Yeats added.

“…Yeah.”

“You’re a fool.” He said bitterly.

“Now wait a minute,” I argued. “You don’t know what this world is like now. You don’t know the kind of despair there is. After you died there were more wars. Genocide, then nuclear bombs, then suicide bombers. People are sick, starving, dying all over. Animals are going extinct, big ones, because of us.”

Yeats looked bewildered. “…And what can be done to save these big animals?” Ugh, not the point I was trying to make.

Okay, ramble time. Floodgates opening. “No, I mean everything is because of us. There’s this virus and the climate is changing and the planet is heating up and there’s fires starting all over the place and especially in the Amazon and killer whales can’t hear each other over the cruise ships and racism is rampant everywhere and cops are killing black and indigenous people and women are still getting treated like shit and water levels are rising and they’re saying we’ve only got a few more years until the planet is uninhabitable and I just want to do something about it but I’m only one person and I can’t deal with it all. I can’t.” Whew, that was a lot.

Yeats looked unexpectedly calm. I had more.

“There’s all this anger and hatred and I’m just this one guy, and my culture is the cause of it all and I hate the history of the people I come from and I hate the society I’m part of, and I hate that I can’t not participate with my cell phone and my car and my university job and colonial heritage and my cheap flight to Ireland and my fucking privilege to just escape it all...” And now folks, completely collapsing. “And on top of all that, my heart is broken, I’m shattered, I don’t know who I am or who I want to be. I’m so lonely, I don’t know how to heal and I don’t want this weight… Please… I just need this weight taken from me. I can’t carry it. It’s too much.” I felt a whimper rise in me and turn into a sob. Something in Yeats felt what I was feeling, that grief. He saw it all in me and held it, but it didn’t last. His hand raised to his chest and he took a step toward me.

“You think I don’t know what the world’s like?” His face hardened. “Piss off!” He stormed over to me with darkness in his eyes. “I don’t need the woes of some dystopian future to know what it’s like to live in grief. It’s always been here, everywhere you look. You think I don’t know what it’s like to see my people, my friends, my family suffer from the state of the world? I lived through a war, like generations before me. I saw the culture of my people and our ways and beliefs ripped away by a foreign power that just wanted more land, more money, more control. Sound familiar?” He stuck his hand out toward the hillside. “You wonder why I wrote down all these stupid stories on this stupid hilltop?! Because that’s all that was left! You think the experience was anything different for the people driven out of here ages ago who only live in superstition now? ‘Faeries under the hillside’…? If they exist, you think they aren’t bitter and cold and furious from that, just like the rest of us?” He had a point. “And on top of all that…” He was mocking me, “you think I didn’t suffer heartache every fucking day of my life? You think Maude Gonne was some passing fancy I wrote a few sappy poems for? Do you have any understanding of the decades I longed for her?! The love I felt for her despite my inability to be the political hero she wanted? Do you have any idea what that kind of rejection feels like?! You got a little hurt and flew across the ocean to just lay down and die in a faery hole? Fuck you!” He gave me a shove and I fell backward onto the stone walk. It felt personal. Yeats gestured to the craggy hillside beyond the cemetery. “You think you could just walk out in to the wild and get swallowed up by some compassionate creature from the underworld? As if they’d see you pouting your way up the mountainside and just take it all away out of pity?”

My eyes were glued between my feet. I couldn’t face him. “Y-yes.” I had no defence left.

“Fine.” He hoisted me up by the arm and dragged me toward the grassy slope. “I’ll show you the white square in the limestone. Let’s go. I was wrong about you, boy. You don’t deserve this torment.” He looked up at the sky. My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. My whole body felt like it had gone dry. I tried to speak but it was only a croak. “You clearly can’t handle this cruel world, so sally forth! I’ll show you exactly where the doorway is.”

“Don’t patronize me.” I managed to squeak out.

“Oh, sincerest apologies, M’Lord.” He took another step toward me. “You think that going off and disappearing in some secret meadow in this godforsaken and blighted landscape is going to solve anything? You think just sodding off into some dream-world is going to end your heartache? I’ve got news for you, and I know from experience – it does fuck-all.”

I yanked my arm away. I felt brittle. “Yeah but you had Ballylee, you had George, you had your children. You had people around you that loved you and you made something of it.” I had to reason with myself on this one at least. I childishly shoved my hands in my coat pockets, and found something new in each. A snail shell in my left. A worn tarot card in the other: The Fool card.

Yeats huffed a sharp laugh. “You’re just getting started, I see. Thank Arthur Waite for that one... Guess where he is!” He growled and shook and stomped the ground with both feet. After a bout of furious leaping he calmed down and arranged his jacket and tossled hair back into place. He was exasperated. “When you get to the dim kingdom, say hello for me.”

“I thought you said you didn’t believe in the Sidhe.” I muttered angrily.

Yeats slapped his thigh and strode back up to me, our faces practically touching. His lyrical voice had become a rasp. “You want to see the ‘white square in the limestone?’” He wiped the hair from his forehead. “I’ll walk you straight to it.” He was shaking now. “I’ve walked through every fucking faery doorway in this country looking for the same thing as you. Years I looked. Years I wanted free.” He took a step away and swung his hands out. “Never granted. Never glamoured. Never a moment of mercy for what I carried... and you… you think I’m just some token concierge of the fantastical. First stop, dolmens. Next stop, Dromahair. Well, off you go, then.” He grabbed my shoulder and spun me toward the hillside. “From that dark fissure, the notched one.” He pointed with a shaking finger to the south side of the slope. “There over the scree and just left. Do you see it?”

My eyes darted, and in a salty blur, I spotted a notch and nodded. “Yes.” I said through tears.

“There. There is where they issue forth. Happy?” He slapped me on the back. “Go get lost up there, old chap! Maybe the faeries will take you away, maybe a shepherd will find your bones in autumn. Maybe both! Never can tell with wild Irish hillsides.”

 “I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to bring you back just to–”

“Oh, you’re sorry, I’m sorry, everyone’s sorry. Blah-blah-blah.” He waved it away with his hand. Yeats sighed and stared up at the point of Ben Bulben. The rainbow was gone. Our anger passed, and after a time he looked back at me, his voice softer.

“I had a great love once. A great fire in my gut to speak my passions and to be seen and known by that great love. The fantasy of how I wanted things to be was a force I wielded in writing for most of my life. At times, the state of the world at large was more fuel for that fire. It hardened me, gave me courage, taught me things, gave me greater purpose beyond what started as naive passion.” His shoulders went slack. “Then one day it just became too much. We were on the brink of another war, my children were facing a world lacking all common decency, it seemed like the end of times. Maude was married away, the tower cottage flooded, Lady Gregory gone. The ghosts of my past, the chaos of the present time, an unclear future… I came back here to find clarity. I retraced my steps in places I’d written about as a young man: Heart Lake, Opendon’s apothecary, the mill at the river’s edge. First, I wanted answers. When I didn’t get answers, I wanted reasons. Reasons for my suffering. When I didn’t get those, I asked for mercy. Still nothing.” He paused and looked down at his grave. “I requested to be buried here so my ghost could continue searching for that mercy on the mountainside. Ironic that you reawakened that longing, when it was no longer needed.”

 “I’m sorry, I honestly didn’t mean to bring you back.” I said, defeated.

“Yet you did, and now here we sit and what am I to make of it? Brought back to be a boon to some lost Yank who can’t seem to say what he really feels.”

“Would it help if I told you my research will help others know more about you? About Ireland?” I tried to make it sound worth it. I didn’t really know if it was. I sat back down on the stone bench.

“Sure, why not.” He gave a shrug and joined me. “If that were really why you were here. You couldn’t have known that I didn’t like this place all that much. Nobody did.”

“Really?” This was new information.

 “Let’s just say that I have a few secrets of my own. Some we may share, if my intuition serves.” I could feel his mind prodding me. Reminding me of the cliff at Moher, the cairn at Knocknashee. “I’ve been in there as well, once. That tomb. The walls were cold and damp. Tighter than I expected… darker too.”

I felt a sharp point pushing into my thigh suddenly and realized it was coming from my coat pocket. I reached in and pricked my hand on something. “Ow!” I cursed and reached in again more carefully. I pulled out a twig as long as my palm. It was covered in thorns and a few small leaf buds.

“Hawthorn.” Yeats said, nodding. “The good people are having a bit of fun with you.”

“Not the kind of reminders I need right now.” I said.

“I could say the same.”

I turned the twig in my fingers. “Why would you want to keep searching if you knew you would have the peace you wanted in death? It sounds like you had an easy out.”

“Why did you want to come back?” Yeats countered.

“I guess I couldn’t stay away from the sadness. I had to know if I’m still that person I was before. If I’m still anyone at all.”

“Well there you go. And you thought that would happen here?”

“I guess so… I hoped so.” I said, honestly.

“Do you feel like someone now?” he asked.

“How can I tell?”

“Seems good enough evidence right there.” He pointed to a spot of blood pooling in my palm from the hawthorn twig. Damn he’s good.

We shared a long silence.

“What do I do with all this grief?” I finally asked.

 “Acknowledge it.” Yeats said plainly. “Observe it. Give it space to breathe in you, and eventually you will take your eyes off it from time to time.” He smiled. “And you might find that when you look back, the kind folk will have taken parts of it away, right from under you.”

“So, you do believe the stories.”

“Of course I do.”

“And the good people took away your grief as well?” I asked, hopeful.

 “Some of it, over time. One thing you have to understand is that they take it away slowly, in small loads, on account of them being little folk and their arms simply can’t grasp it all at once.” That signature wry smile again.

I groaned, but smiled after. He was still nodding. “No, truly,” he said assuredly. “It’s their tiny arms. I’ve seen them.” He chuckled, and put his hand on my shoulder. “You’re not the first, you know, looking for directions to oblivion.”

“This isn’t your first resurrection?” I asked, sarcastically.

“This is the first post-mortem case, but not my first resurrection. The first one I did myself.”

“Where?”

“In the tomb, on the hilltop of Knocknashee.” He said with a smirk. He hoisted himself up and began walking in the direction of the chapel again. I turned to watch him go.

“Did you die in there?”

“Not the way I’d expected to. Not in the more permanent fashion, like here.” He stood over his gravestone and let his fading hand linger on the top of the slab. “They say you should only visit a grave if you intend to leave something in it. Mercy isn’t here. Answers aren’t here. Only you and what must be allowed to transform.” He turned and continued walking, losing his solid shape as he went. “I’m going inside the chapel anyway.”

“But that’s not where you–”

“You don’t need to know where magic is in order to find it... only to be ready for it when it arrives.”

A wind rose suddenly and howled down the cliffside, thrumming against the gravestones like ghosts singing a strange chorus. Leaves tore from their summer stems and spiralled across the wet courtyard. I gripped the collar of my raincoat and pulled it tight across my chin, but as quickly as the gust had come, it left. I loosened my grip on my collar and looked back toward the chapel. Yeats was gone. I felt something once again in my coat pocket and reached in cautiously for another gift from the Sidhe, but only found the keyset to my rental car. A gift as well, I suppose. I stood and passed his grave one last time. Time for me to go too, back to my trusty road map and own resurrection. The gift shop coffee tasted just as bad on this side of today as before. My boots were still wet, heart still broken.

But tomorrow, Innisfree.

Yeats and I at Ben Bulben

From that dark fissure, the notched one,
There over the scree and left, they issue forth.
Come bounding, springing, crawling
Like flocks, like prides, like hordes
Joyous and wretched 

Skipping and singing,
The gleeful songs and clawed fingers
Slipping and slinking,
Their layered and terrible melodies
Echo down the slope 

Draped in the moon­­
Tongues flick undying lips
Bodies heave, tangle, toil
Frolicking and fucking
Ecstatic and tormented. 

That one steals livestock,
That one broke the plough,
That one dances on graves,
That one pissed in a holy well. 

Do they come every night?
Every one. 

And mortals found are mortals taken;
A fortnight for the Sally washing at the spring,
Ten years for the gleeman napping roadside.
A century for the child rolling on the lawn,
Nevermore for the lost one on the hill. 

And if they find me?
Time and you will vanish, come away. 

And cares away, so far away
Feasted, forgotten
As a dream upon waking
Your mind, your lives, your loves.
The cliff, the riverside, the tomb:
            Lost. 

Lost?
until returned.
When?
you cannot know.