There is a stranger
within me,
an intruder
who is not me
and is a part of me.

We co-exist
and yet
it’s he
who habitates
as I exist.

He swallows
and I drink
who’ll die
when I die,
or so I think?

Edward Mycue

On the concrete nouns front, I think my “Tired Words, Working Words” essay is pretty good — http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/tiredworking.htm

I admire this family material of yours. My family doesn’t exist. That is, I’m a second-generation Californian whose parents & grandparents cut their ties to “back home” as they moved west. All my cousins are fundamentalist Christians.

i keep banging out stuff w/no publication plans and don’t think of them as ‘privishings’ (as lawrence fixel spoke of work assigned to the drawer vs publishing work you consciously decide to send out).

there is where they come from: ‘there’, for the inside to outside and i don’t pay attention to the shape the outside becomes. of course, i may change it, reshape it by mixed arrangements.

here’s a development that is a back-and-forth effort i am initiating to get my retired (from the history museums of the rio grande’s nuevo santander area)archivist & historian brother david mycue to jump-in and take over. you can see i operating not simply without shame or style but from impulse (pulse)because i feel the time is a worn thread.
DANIEL OWEN DELEHANT ONE OF MY 4 GREAT GRANDFATHERS
today, i just decided to remember family history and took note for my aunt jane (she’s to be 92 on feb 28,2008–my dad’s birthdate is feb 28 4 years earlier in 1912, but his mom Margaret Powers Mycue was from Dublin and had the old superstition abt leap year feb 29 and had the parish –irish priest–list it as feb 28, 1912). i don’t know if i’ll continue with the zillions of stories in my family (s), but at least i have set this down. anyone can do it. no one says they can make you continue. i challenge you challenge we challenge others to go do it, the cowards. we start it. and when and if we feel like it we can or may not go on. here’s what little i got today–

Lockport, NY, nested next to Niagara Falls, has a lot of files with story connections.

A greatgreat grandmother Catherine Finn (McCrary when she was married) at 12 was the oldest of the 4 girls her parents sent for once they were established in USA. Bridget, 2, died and was “slipped into the sea”. Anna was 10 and Jule (Julia) was 7. This was in the 19th century. Greatgrandma McCrary died when Aunt Jane Delehant Ryan (mom’s sister next in line and my godmother born 1916) was in the 2nd grade. I got this information from Aunt Jane on the phone. She’s the only one left. Her son Anthony Ryan has collected a lot of information. And, also, Annie O’Connor, Aunt Blanche Delehant O’Connors’s youngest will probably know a lot. And if not her, her sister Bridget Flynn and her brothers Edward Michael O’Connor and Daniel O’Connor.

Aunt Doe (Dorothy Taylor) my grandmother Agnes Taylor Delehant’s youngest sibling
was 12 years older than my mother. It was she and ‘uncle’ Roy I recall after great uncle Will McCreary and greatgrandma Taylor died who took responsibility of my mother Ruth, at 17, and aunt Jane, 16, and Blanche, 14, when they returned from Cincinnati upon

the death of Agnes Taylor Delehant

who with her children (when my mom ruth was 14) had moved (after the death of mom’s dad Edward Vincent Delehant) to be near Jennie (Jane) Delehant Jack who lived their with her felt manufacturer husband and son. Mom’s grandmother Jane Kennedy Delehant and grandfather Daniel Owen Delehant lived with them in the early days of the great Depression. There are many stories there of deceit, alcoholism, grand theft, love,
suffering, heroism, collapse and renewal. Had Edith Wharton lived long enough she could have told it.

Edward Mycue 25 January 2008 8:27PM Friday

sure. i’ll attach it. ed [it's just a fragment or shard. hardly speaks of dan delehant and his infidelities, nor of grampa ed's 12yrold request to his mom to take "pap" back, nor or her reply she would but never have conjugal relations thereafter, nor of ggdan's watchman role for mom's uncle (aunt jennie’s husband) john alan jack's theiving in the middle of the night of the stockpiles of cloth that had been bought for the felt-makind and that he sold elswhere, nor of mom and ggdan's train ride when mom was 7 and found out that 'french toast' was just the same as grammy's dipped bread and how she learned from that when ggdan and conductor sniggered that her pretentional preference for 'french' things could cost her a mite of self-respect, nor of ggdan's abdominal pain and that in the ambulence--or when it came- -mom heard him gasp in relief that it pain went away and that that was when the appendix had burst and so he died soon after maybe a day or so from peritonitis.]

you’ll remember all of these and more. and ggdan was just one of our 4-gg’s. the one called aiken mycue who’d gone at 12 w/his dad in 1863 w/a land grant signed by lincoln (he signed a lot of these) to minnesota, lake vivian in that county that starts w/a w, and who married the harmon girl on the next parcel of land, our ggaiken, william oliver mycue’s dad and our granddad, killed himself behind the barn in grief over hearing of the –possibly strange?, unexplained?–death of our ggmom who ill had gone to nebraska to be with her sister. so much more there.

and the greatgrandfather powers, margaret powers, of who i know nothing. when richard and i were in dublin in 1985 i gathered that powers there was jones or chu here and it could be of ‘powers court’ folk or more likely from ‘powers’ meaning poor.
David Mycue wrote:
Ed,
Could you send me another copy of that interesting genealogy. I inadvertantly erased it while trying to do something else. I’d like to make a hard copy of it for my genealogy files.
Love, David.

addendum: how abt ggdad mccrary (sp?)( & can’t recall first name) the ‘fence jumper’ who is believed to be ggaunt kit’s father, making her our greatgrama taylor’s and gguncle will mccreary’s half sister (who was
adopted –ggaunt kit—from father baker’s orphanage by ggmccrary and raised as her servant in the boarding house she ran, a daily reminder of his adultery to ggrandfather mccrary. he was a railroad man and passed a neighbor’s house where an adolescent girl lived, ‘fence-jumping’ was term mom and aunt jane used in telling me this when I was in my late 50’s when I was old enough for such family history. and of course that set the stage for the great court case put by ggaunt kit and gguncle jim Hughes where kit was awarded (because she wasn’t educated like beck or even will but worked in the boarding house as a servant) I think it was what then was substantial sum of $1000.00 –and that’s what aunt doe could never forgive her aunt kit for, the public scandal. not that it was everafter ‘public’ in our families. mom’s mom agnes always welcomed her aunt kit as you know. of course agnes had married Edward Vincent delehant against her mother’s
refusal (and that’s why the young father roach married them in the sacristry secretly even though they were well over the legal age for marriage). oh, and how about ‘tiger engineering company’ that ggfatherdan and our grandfather Edward were partners in;
and of Edward being a city alderman, and abt him losing his job for letting his friends through customs on I think the rainbow bridge—but may be the other–; and ed’s early death in mid-40’s; and of the little shop our grandmother agnes set up w/financial help of aunt jennie jack no doubt and that was robbed, depression depths then, of all those beautiful fine clothes and how that then became a survival store selling whatever she could of tinned foods, etc. and some assortment of dried goods.

addendum: how abt our ggdad taylor called ‘oren’ who when he died (diphtheria you know—caught from his dying little altarboy son when he against orders entered the deathroom and took his child in his arms & thus died soon after—there was a newspaper notice in the Niagara Falls Gazette, must have been: a neighbor said go ggm Rebecca taylor he’d seen the death notice for a ‘robert nicholas’ taylor and was that man related to
oren: and ggramma taylor said that was oren. oren was the nickname that he was known by since childhood I guess, r.n. ‘rn’ that became oren. after those 2 deaths from diphtheria ggtaylor never went back to church as she couldn’t bear to see the altar boys.

edward mycue 1:14pm monday 28-january-2008

there you have it, joseph, a dumster of memory and idea that is only phenomenologically and momentarily necessary. if the moment passed without proceeding thus, what? edward mycue

By the way, I would have loved to know William Dickey — a real favorite of mine, whose forms were never there merely for their own sake. From what you write, he sounds like the kind of poet for whom form served as a stimulus to invention. That’s not the only kind of poet, of course, as your work & practice demonstrate.