Grandpa Mike was one tough ol’ Irishman,

who dwelled in the smelly, dank cabin of the MIC-EDDIE,

a tub of a sail boat he and his old friend, Eddie O’Malley

(who died before their boat was launched)

built together.

Grandpa painted signs on bar windows, seafood restaurants and provision stores

up and down Water Street in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, NY

for living expenses and booze.

A cheap life, a dime squeezed into a dollar.

Now and then, he sailed out into the Atlantic, North-East to Montauk Point,

came about and continued through The Gut to sail west against the wind and tide

down the North Shore of Long Island to visit my family on City Island.

He came smelling rank and shitty…

(Yes! He did smell!)

Until, after a day or so of my sister and I gaging,

Dad would finally force Grandpa to take a bath.

Then Mom would steal and toss his filthy clothes into a burn barrel

and buy him new blue jeans, flannel shirts and underwear

at the old Sears store on Main Street,

just a few blocks from our little apartment.

Grandpa died in an ironic but timely death in a Brooklyn flop house fire

where he smoked one cigar too many in a drunken doze.

He was living there, broken, after the MIC-EDDIE

floundered at her mooring during Hurricane Carol, in August, 1954.

Yes, he was a nare-do-well bum whose only brush with civility

came in a brief to-do with Louise Mattisen,

a staunch Norwegian Adventist who had succumbed

to his well hidden Irish charm, but only momentarily,

enough for her to give birth to my Mother, Genevieve Elizabeth Fagan….

But, Oh! how he could make his harmonica wail!

There’s an old, local-newspaper photo of him

sitting in a boson’s rigging-chair on top of the MIC-EDDIE’s cabin

playing sea shanties and I.R.A. war songs,

while the rest of his home lay sunk in the muck,

water up to the cabin top after Hurricane Carol

had laid fury on Long Island.

And he could paint glorious scenes of places he’d never seen

and he carved amazing replicas in Balsa wood

of a Samauri sword, a Bowie knife and the Sword of Demosthenes

he’d later gift to me for my kid-hood-adventures on the sandy beaches of City Island…

(They’re all lost now, but I still remember their weightless heft….)

He’d painted on card board squares or flimsy cake boxes

or sheets of newsprint stapled 4 or 5 sheets thick,

using cheap oil paints, acidic enough to dissolve his art,

to disintegrate the paper in a quick while

after gracing our Sound Side apartments otherwise bare walls.

Tragic, the loss of these temporary paintings

of Arizona deserts, North Pole igloos and black-swamps filled with rainbows of water-lilies.

Places he’d thought must exist somewhere…

And the intricately carved, thin handles of the swords and knives he’d carved

shattered against the wooden bulwarks and concrete, street-end barriers built to hold off the Sounds waves,

in mock battles with invisible Babzai attacks and Nazi storm troopers,

the inherited enemies of my post-war generation.

But I wonder, now, when I am reminded to remember

Grandpa and his untutored artistry,

(a sort of salty, Irish, male Grandma Moses,)

by some photo of some wrecked yacht,

high and dry on some South Pacific beach

or see a miraculous painting of some ancient place on some old museums wall….

Haven’t his disintegrated paintings,

or the intricately detailed, shattered handles

of those carved, wooden weapons he’d crafted and proudly handed to me

wrapped in a New York Daily News

or his harmonic symphonies played from the moored stern of the MIC-EDDIE….

haven’t they all added to the spirit of beauty in the world?

Isn’t there some small corner on some dusty palace wall in Heaven

where hangs the spirit of the art-work of Michael Fagan,

denizen of a Brooklyn flop house

and a moldy, damp cabin of an old wreck sunk down beneath a Brooklyn Bay?

And aren’t they worth at least a cursory viewing by a passing saint or novice angel

just as much as some early, fast sketch of an old Monet’ Lilly

not quite irredesicent enough for the old French Impressionist

or a partial rendition of Mona Lisa,

her smile thought, thus far, insufficiently enigmatic by DaVinci,

though her eyes catch the viewer in her magnetic smile.

I’ve come to believe, whenever I’m remembering Grandpa Mike

that there is no useless art…

No meaningless creation.

That art, any attempt at beauty, even temporary, or tarnished, or tainted

by the brokenness and limitations of the artist,

is always worthy of our consideration,

is a part of the center of the heart of all of human-kinds created beauty,

ever flowing from the brilliant or untrained or foul-stained hand of ever creative humanity.

A provenance, substantiating our own creation in the image of the ever creating Divine.

Moving us away, way beyond the cabin top of a sunken wreck deep in a Brooklyn harbor

on to an art shop,

perhaps in a back alley

between heavens golden streets.