I wondered if that was what the man was reading, maybe at the exact moment I'd thought of them. Or if he'd turn the page and those words would be written there, maybe even right in the middle of the page, or right in the middle of a different poem, some kind of printing mistake willed by my selective memory. Making my way through the crowd, I was surprised to spot my friend holding two drinks. I took one when she handed it to me. "These are for us," She said matter-of-factly. "From them." Men. Their attention had zapped me back into my body, made me substantial in a way that brought both immediate relief and a little apprehension. I'm still curious about that balance. From one perspective I feel my difficulties arise from a lack of acknowledgement. Omission, being left off the record of the night, is the danger. For some reason I find this possibility off-putting. Perhaps this is the source of my dissociative discomfort and now, my relief. Or maybe the situation is a little different. Maybe I crave the forced activity, the thrill of it, because being in the position of talking to someone else is always more vulnerable than being silent. It still feels awkward to me to be bought something. I gave the group a few equally stiff handshakes and said a polite thank you.

A few minutes later, one of them told me "This wasn't really his scene." It absolutely was, of course, but I humored him and asked what he'd rather be doing. He had to lean over for me to hear him. He was tall, all of them were, and the more I drank the more I realized how pleasant it was to stand beside them, to feel like the smallest and quietest person. I interrupted the conversation to ask what we should all drink to, because I believe in toasts and had already been quiet too long. As it turned out the one next to me, whose scene it definitively wasn't, had gotten a promotion.

"What do you do?" I asked, rather pro forma, as he bought me another beer. He worked in shipping: imports, exports. I forget regularly how close Ireland is to the sea, how much that coast shapes the character. I asked if he was a nautical sort of person. I wanted him to be, so I could ask him more about boats and if he'd ever capsized. He said that he did and used to sail as a child. But he found it stressful, maintaining composure in choppy seas.

It reminded me of Billy Budd, and the necessity of ferocity in crises. The whole novella is about duty, moral and actual and otherwise, and how rough seas can transform wicked decisions into necessary ones. I didn't have necessarily positive feelings about Melville, or books about sailing mutinies, which often include scenes of swashbucklers having remedial conversations about "justice," or the writer interjecting with what passed for humor in the 19th century. I told him about this, and he made some joke about how the mutiny among his group of friends would play out. Now that I knew them, at least a little, I laughed, recognizing the role each would play: the innocent fool, the brusque commander, the inconsistent joker. Their personalities fell into place, little pedestals upon which I could stand and remark on their behavior as we watched them entertain my friend and some other girls who had joined us. He refilled my glass with some of his drink. Was it alcohol that helped you appreciate things uncritically? How simple it was to stand there with those guys, asking whatever random, irrelevant question came to mind. Whatever it was, they would answer. I asked one where his accent was from (Dingle). I asked about public transit, and they told me you could ride the train around Ireland for free if you were 66. Would the old man benefit from this program and take the bus for free after he finished his poems and beer?

At some point later, we were at another bar. This one sounded and smelled the same as the first, even though all the component parts were different. What is it about people that they come together to form the night out as a perpetual entity, no matter where they are? It reminded me of the Theseus ship, only in reverse. How could something with everything inside it changed and replaced become an exact replica of something else? "It's probably a result of globalization." He said. I was impressed by this evidence that he had been paying attention to my long story about the inherent sameness of everything. On the other hand, I wasn't sure if the sameness I was talking about extended beyond our experience of the West, but I wasn't going to bring that up.

There were small differences, I admitted later, between home and here. The old man had caught my eye at the previous bar because of his age, and here he was far from the only one. Whole families arrived early and at this point in the night were clearly staying late. I wondered how they had so much to talk about, if that was why so many of them had a newspaper or a book. Who else was reading Keats in here, and would I ever find out if they were? I looked up the rest of the poem when I got home after strategically disengaging from the kind, if bland, recently-promoted shipping guy. You could smell the sea stepping out of the bar, and my mind wandered, languid and warm, to boats again.

The poem, I realized, isn't about spring at all. It's about autumn, the inevitability of beautiful things ending, the way in which sweetness cannot last. I thought about the last four days I had found myself on the isle, how much I liked it and felt compelled to return. I wanted very much for the beauty of this time and place to last. I wanted to continue exploring the sameness of life here, and how that sameness was different from the way in which things were the same back home. I wanted to find the old man and asked how he felt about "To Autumn," and if he liked the parts about spring the best too. I even wanted to find the shipping guy again, just to know that there were people out there who would listen to my stories and musings without wanting something in return. To bask in this permanent pleasantness and learn not to worry about being made substantial by others. It feels like something I could learn here, a lesson that might elude me everywhere else.

Keats 1819