VENN WORLDS (2001) HOW REVISITATIONS HEALING-WELL WHATEVER HAPPENED TO CLARE TORRY? MUSIC ROOM BEDRIDDEN TRIO UNDER GREEN USING MY FATHER’S RAZOR THE LOST CHORD STROKE THE BEES AT SURGEON KIRBY’S GRAVE THE OLD PIANO LEVEL FOUR A MUTE LIBRETTO INTERIORS KEEL MORE REASON TO PRAISE BLACK SWALLOWS VENN WORLDS A PAINTING OF A TREE BY A RETURNED EMIGRANT THE SNIPER PLAYS BRAHMS ANGEL AND HOURGLASS DAYBREAK THREAD BIKERS ROSSNOWLAGH ITASCA VALEDICTION TYRONE UNDER THE IVORY GATE MY LITTLE GIRL HOW (from Seán Ó Ríordáin, Conas) How will we say what has been unsayable; how flesh the word true to the syllable? How nerve ourselves to the impulse of the unsaid: as our tongue the bone, our soul the marrow-cell? REVISITATIONS Tremor cordis. Remember how it was at about twenty trying to decipher Latin tags in the winter garden but nothing connecting, language resolute in keeping out; the soil too, locked and blank, leaves swept or ribboned, verges black and razored; everything neat, controlled, indifferent as points of foil in a bare sky ferrying to contentment somewhere else. There are names we didn't know those days: depression, panic attack, anxiety, we'd heard them maybe, mouthed by some comedian, now common currency, but no phrase can coin or catalogue the unnameable uniqueness of pain you think peculiarly your own; imagine unending absences, the frozen space between untouching hands; aurora australis; summer solstice breaking on a land you'll never visit. HEALING-WELL (i.m. Paul Johnson) Where it is now none of us can tell. We used to see it just below the road when we were bussed to Louth or Monaghan waving flags and scarves at coming cars. Strips of shirts, wires of ribbon hung strangely limp and ragged round its thorns. You'd only see the bush, never the well where pilgrims came to carry home a cure, a bottle of brackish, sediment-stilled water and wrap round branches scraps of patients' clothing; the cloth before the cure, token of faith calling back to Patrick and beyond. The water's drained now, part of land improvement or piped under a stretch of widened road: gone anyhow. A trucker in a layby reads about the weekend-breaking scandal or how the talks are stalled, or in the balance. Still we need to pin a scrap of hope like the Celtic scarf that hangs out where you died, no other mark, the grass not even gashed. The cloth before the cure, token of faith. So great a world, so small a piece of cloth. WHATEVER HAPPENED TO CLARE TORRY? (for Tom Flynn) A perfect day: light, time, possibility, summer still and breathless, uniforms discarded; martins on the wing, greenery unmoving. Where is that haunted, dreamless sleep? Whatever happened to Clare Torry? Tiny sounds in dawn-attendant rooms flickered, the uneven pulse of want. A quarter-century on, another need: three nights ago I read Macbeth. That scant first studying, punctuated by reedy pirate tracks, digs deeper now as bombs bleed into a blackened Asian sky; too horribly true the slaughtered babes of Fife littering a mountain road. How can I envy you in your retirement: book-lined walls, mist-early lawns, commentaries, the luxury of pondering human baseness? Spared the waking news, the paperboy brings more: no bells toll, the imagined weapon real, each scruple simple as sand. There's a terrible edge to the dreamy, sun-drenched vista. That it once was true, it seems, must be sufficient consolation; and, though doomed, that there is somewhere as sharp a purity as when Clare split summer with a wordless knife. MUSIC ROOM The metronome is still; neutral the co-ordinates of that other triangle - lamp, seat, key. The score waits; peaks and troughs, that run of distant notes. Don't walk under ladders, its small sky- corner cut, the trinity offended. Spirit lurks where unwary thought or step is meshed in air. It was here I was taught the rudiments and learned, in spite of all was meant to show me otherwise, truth was beyond the brink of hand and eye; the left line by itself had a togetherness more pure for having made no sense. That bass a paradigm of all I've done since. Harmony seems to flee my hands' clumsy hovering; quavers on the stave weave, stand petrified, and die as fingers blink then break atonally. Beyond the brain now, the room and its every artefact dumb, music in the broken air dissipated, but still whole somewhere. BEDRIDDEN Slow day wheels by, nurses wheeling leave lines of light as if by trick photography, dark sparrows flit dappling damp leaves, land to feed from an abandoned plate. Shapes, no substance; bodies cross lit doorways to adjoining rooms. Small silences; a ladle- tap conjures home, the suffocating sense of intimacy lost. It ticks the death of time. Ceiling cracked, plaster flakes to a shaky Mississippi River drawn from a surreal atlas, mould oxbows meander the huge blank territory of the young - O my sweet love forgive me any wrong I ever did you, those kindnesses ignored, burden of the strong - too late: the blinds are drawn by others, unconcerned, the trolley steered by antiseptic hands. TRIO The floors you knew are crumbling: nizzen huts freaks now like huge greened-over cloches or trellises for rampant breeching weed. No odds of brass glint under sudden sunslant; polythene on briars, tarry crows measure the muted passing of a sound marooned in the dark dooms of its memory and we in turn abandoned to the constant cold that sang then in our unwilling knuckles, Christmas strangely, comfortingly bleak - people gone to eat in one-day rooms with walls subdued, the fire damp and smoky. The empty square promised us New Year ready to be written on. No more: we never cared which way the wind was blowing or where cold came from. It was all the same; what was, was what was happening, that simple; no doorway to a hidden place, no need, no longing we could recognise as other that a kind of mental itch long days would cure. Words and music then were no evasion. The nearer a place, the less inclined to visit. So with the past, it seems; those railway coats my closed eyes hint at already once removed, broad-suited men who gruffly smelt of valve-oil and stabbed out Woodbines in pre-carol chorus, what world did they inhabit: was it gone before their eyes, or did they ride that flux in rough, deep, uneven silent nights? I see their fingers awkward on the valves, at home there, too; the rest is sound past hearing, discomforting, a baton passed, a sense of weight that never leaves, however free or rhythmic-gracefully the body glides or stops, exulting, wonderfully breathless. No one can measure the crumbling of a house or of the people in it; how their thoughts slip a notch to worry, then to fear, from irritability to futile rage; rising damp, a thousand minor faults dead citizens of a forgotten state; whatever page the book falls open at whispers the end of empire. Outside, children made up games, were caught in strawberry nets or split ripe pears with careless windward casts; other walls hold them now, worldwise scattered, one at least at any time in light but none of them enlightened, except perhaps by constant dark encroaching on the edge. And always now, when I hear a brass band march I tense my body against recollection while the bass section brings us down to where we are today; and wait for the change of key that brings the trio, falsity and hope, resolution, journey's end and triumph before the drop to sullied innocence. UNDER GREEN No blackbird scream illuminates the dim richness of that now-dreamt foliage. This yellow sea is deadly, sallow corn; only the doomed dew lingers till noon, no remnant of surface sun survives where stalks refuse to bend. Here you stumble, feet lost where once you sat meditating the nature of light, luxurious essences conjured, in whose distance the possible welled like a sudden fragrance and a wordless voice flooded that pinpoint space with Sunday evening in Provence. Sunday too, birds open-mouthed and slow, tree-tops split by relentless blue, the hammer hit - feet's leaden weight lifting, falling back without point as in that dream of perpetually walking home lost in a visible tightening gloom no day dispels. In that second of appalled epiphany, something cosmic stalled. All asleep, the clock in the next room, dipped to semi-second silence, leaps and is off again, rhythmic as a cough defines the space, the ornamental delph's remembered patterns, the budgerigar's grip tight in the cage, its mirror somehow lit. Taped birdsong lets false dawn linger in dark a while. Among what dens are those golden bones whitening; in what corner of a yellowed ditch their feather-carbon leach through stagnant husks of slime-soft beech? Return. Straw gods' blank numberless fields are squares of dry ungraven gold, height, distance, outline the pained earth, etch ghosts of fern and habitation, trenches whose bones inter the innocence of mapped frontiers. No use waiting for blind triumphant winter to pare to skeleton stone ruin under green, or a new barn to pound all to foundation. USING MY FATHER'S RAZOR How could I have forgotten how you smelt! And now I know I never will again I bend and curve my memory to the warm crook of your arm about me in your chair; a midweek night, the television off, I asked your age; you told me thirty-seven. And I was five. O the green of that armchair whose dappled cushion-squares were hedge and pasture, the whole room too, that massive portholed sideboard, heavy drapes, the kitchen table-top layered like liquorice. As lightning-lit it's there and gone, recalled without being seen but something lingers, something of Donne's quintessence, and all he has to say of death, though true, crumbles and blows to dust, and here we are, you and I both, blind before a glass. THE LOST CHORD The first snow is come. Uniform, grey, hill, sky, buildings, rear and dissolve in their own revolving oneness. Let us say the horizon is fixed at an arbitrary eye level, what does it tell us about that leap of faith? For to be sure it teases memory and opens, like alcohol, a well that seeps into the darkhour waking pores, the mills of secrecy. They say that when we breathe we exhale atoms of the onions Archimedes ate. What then of chords in an abandoned room; whose hum electrified the blood, whose crashing din was all there was of art, of love, of hope? How much was more than optimism, grit round which the beautiful in spite was wept, pure mind in waves like sound stretched out and split? Visiting, you court the empty spaces, remaining walls are blank renunciation of how your years away controlled such loss - no power can match the drip of patient ageing - myself no better, trying to second-guess your line of vision in a flurry of snatched hours, that mildewed patch a blotch on the street's face - chatter in cold, renounce the metaphor. Tomorrow, risen above the storm, all, hidden, for once the same, will not exist except in plan or recollection. In your sudden own non-being, suspended by the jet's temporary tear of flame on air, what talisman to charm that naked terror - a locked-on prayer; that past and present roar; a rush of blood, or strange inverted laughter? STROKE Twisted, those lines of Marvell lodged in his mind, stuck like the immovable ticking of a broken second hand, the seen and remembered melted like time's dribble on his chin until grasses' pins and needles across ear and neck and the fall of the topmost apple, from which there was no drawing back, were for the moment a drunken comfort, adrenalin's freak. Not since a child had he seen the heart of a living wall or peered from ground level into an aphid world, or later, a fixed flattened fragment of that great black bowl under which they found him, blank and rigid. Dark greyed to a mist as he knew someone had lifted him, earth's smell lost, the hedge moved to a pin of light, his eyes locked on the east. THE BEES AT SURGEON KIRBY'S GRAVE The bees will find no heart, no hollow stone soften to their persuasive jaws; they hover, stack and land on the granite ledge whose cracked cement has lured them to swarm and futile death. Their queen at rest, forever wedged and bloated, they arch above the path, sound-rainbows whose last remaining instinct is to sting. They guard the grave from gardeners and the curious. Cypress, gravel, cede to a weedkilled wilderness, scorched earth stone-soldiered. Elsewhere ivy, bat, blackbirds home on certain shelter in branch and brick; no wind may blast the queen's powdered strain from the perfection of her shell. THE OLD PIANO The old piano waits two perfect half-moons burnt into its ivory earth-brown, a black equator between notes, keys finger-defying, resolutely stiff: an odd arpeggio fragments under hammers' damp resistance. Its dust-sealed lid topped by the perfect red of a single fresh-cut peony lush, black-tipped, the vase more often joining in the cavernous hum of attempted songs, their incompleteness sealed by hands' relief after the tune's abandoned. A step back: pan along damp striped paper to that odd alcove enriched minutely once by Bach echoing; a worn stool, piled unsteadily with junk, and under all a sheet, clean, crisp, virginal, that held within, its own life, mind-mastering until mastered in turn, held too in someone's hands, that dark delicious doubt of anticipation, and somewhere there the crushed dust of a flower, its petals trapped, transparent, indeterminate. LEVEL FOUR Last night I stopped to hear the rooks out-drench their treetops. Soon other leaves will slowly wash over the round glass roof where stars tracked the gazing months and this tower of yours will be a hard, unbudding stem. Open the huge steel fins to swell in distant light like puffed plumage. Already May seduces the air with scent and damp, whitethorn, fennel, cow parsley, fruits of patience. Silent striving, brief sacrifice, blossoms are blotted commas where the rain won't dry. You pass through rooms that are your folded self. The steps swirl, no more a trompe l'oeil that the frozen spiral of that dance you dreamed. Burst out of that body you drew but could not inhabit into the raucous day of promise where wood is wild and sheet metal gleams like slivers of a far fall. (based on the model designed by Eilis O' Donnell for the exhibition A Room of One's Own) A MUTE LIBRETTO Your life a mute libretto, typified by those books on opera you never read. The weeks they lay about your bed, no sound seeped into mind except those nuggets mined where wave has scarcely air to travel on. Encased in rarity and damp, you wandered where - among the dust unstirred to hidden song, or that yawning gap of the absurd aching to be filled with warmth and genius? All kept to yourself. The day-sick bulb, weak eyes, dry tightened lips, were eloquent of a world glimpsed at a remove, piecemeal, fragmented, knotted in a pained wish to make all whole, the sumptuous still sought, the drab still panned. INTERIORS A lifetime is scarcely enough to notice colour veining stone; striated years leach into vision, pocking in highlights that punctuate an unrevealed epic. Darks and greys line, bowed. Arrested by a sermon on the sea, imagination winds round the thread of their minimal movements; odd heads bob like black buoys. And that girl who is leaving the funeral early has nowhere to go but into her life. Unexpected porch-light widens her dry eyes. She has prayed her life into her reddened cheeks. KEEL There is no edge anymore. That noon banking on the molten, blue Atlantic is pure illusion: islands stretching into an emptiness no longer articulated - the last phantom voyagers have long left sails and hawsers rotting on a minute-pointed quay. Even on the brightest day, Slievemore looms, an ever-sudden breaker, the curved walls and crooked corners of its deserted town, centuries' brief flotsam. No roads dare here, no high moving roofs glinting beacons. Instead, advancing scaur funnels light ungraciously down past neat new dormer homes, bone-white, harsh in high summer. No longer random as beached boats, they ring the pass at a safe, neutral height. Built to windward for the view, they refute in this tough green strait, the very narrowness of their passing. Possessions pitched like leaning towers on their backs, the couple who limped in late last night are on the move already. With the stillness of slow nomads, they look into a middle distance: day set, muscle-measured time, an enviable immediate. His hair is combed, wet, everything is ready. The sea is behind them. They have a view that will change as and when they wish. She is perfectly poised. Weighed only by a sudden, vanquished urge to speed, they thread between guy ropes, past cars that will pass them in an hour. They embrace hills, heat, the certainty of tired soreness. An old pot suddenly gleams like a knife as they step onto the road and are gone. The eye has no patience to follow them, it would be easier to follow a star or a pale sail static in a stabbing sea. They had an elegant disdain that was somehow painful, a completeness in their stiff knees, an exhausted strength that was unbreakable in the way they turned their backs on the white houses. MORE REASON TO PRAISE (for Gisela Noy) There is a certainty too in this "more reason to praise" you mention. And it is, as you say, a matter of age. Mellow? I think not; more a reckoning of wonder, as a child will zoom longingly on a loosed balloon, eyes amazed at the floating pattern rather than his loss. For an instant that gap is a treasure in itself, his stunned mind a haze through which no logic passes. It is the sky we can't traverse we gasp at, more so as we plant ourselves in what we once wanted. We can still look down at the universe. BLACK SWALLOWS (after Gustavo Adolfo Becquer 'Volveran') The black swallows will return to nest on your balcony, their wings as they hang at play knocking on your window pane but those who paused to see your loveliness and my unmeasured luck, who learned our murmured names - they will not come back! The thick honeysuckles will return to climb your garden walls, will open to evening again their flowers even more beautiful but those, dew-curded, whose rolling drops we saw tremble and fall clear as day's tears - they will never reappear! Once more your ears will burn to words of love; perhaps something in them will stir your heart from its deep sleep; but kneeling, mute, as men worship at God's altar: that you'll know love again as I have loved you? Never! VENN WORLDS That lime-green paint you applied with an unusual thoroughness, still seals the bay sill; the living-room packed with odd accretions of absent dysfunction: item, ironing board unused, dominant as a kitchen table; shirts I remember pressed in a hurry for Friday gigs. My week done, I'd call to find you creasing collar or band suit, breakfast late, neglected. Venn worlds intersecting at a point of humorous disappointment, music margins of joke or gossip - the dead cat hidden in the piano player's case, the stage cleared - we never named, although we knew, the tedium of the rehashed, futile plan. You rarely mentioned the hard road you knew you'd have to take to leave a harder. Mute that shelf of tapes we knew were maps to an impossible country whose vegetation closes round your exile. A PAINTING OF A TREE BY A RETURNED EMIGRANT The unrecognisable elm I remember: not this, trunk a desert stone, pillar or torso reddened by a remembered sun. Contours are grains you could wear your fingers on; near, the eye blears with ribbons of raw colour. What voices pine, words knot in sandy throats! The imperfect O of an amputated branch is a mute Munchian mouth rimmed in black outline. One drinks from such a bowl once or twice in a lifetime, wood stained with the taste of forgetfulness rough and heavy as an old vine, a perpetual green dancing on surprised buds at odds, as it should; the tree born of a stone-triggered thought, struggles to belong, the immediate pains: here no canopy shelters, every stroke cries a wish to be rootless again, for the barren to flower. Everything we take with us, nose against the earth, is lost to itself, blooms in the unsatisfying new, already dying, lost in the brittle present. So you paint for its own sake. No, for the elemental you can't feel: still air hardening the vague into an indestructible statement: life, in despite, bound to its own release. And we look beyond, into the ever-shifting snapshot, trickily static, of a memory. In an unforced surrender, we recognise each other, the tree always a tree. THE SNIPER PLAYS BRAHMS Practice, practice. The tiny weight on the palm, all balanced, tending towards the perfect point, the atomic arrowhead of rapture. He bows along infinitudes of stillness, each one a recollection. Differences: the wrong palm warmed, the eye not trained, the moment now expanded to long, rhapsodic lines. And now no climax, or rather height without that mad coda of escape, the rhythm ragged, all that missed, misted swimming before the eyes after recoil's release. Outside, the lights are on, rubies, diamonds, thread the tarred slick hills; Brahms' atman throws a blanket round his nerves steeling themselves against the wet of siren undergrowth. He thinks of gut. It hits; the string squeals slightly. Gut and the snapped cord. From nowhere, this, or so he thinks. But no. He knows he has been bought by Brahms and the vulnerable warmth of brittle wood, precious, trusting; that he can at any minute smash it tenses him to sway pleasantly like empty scales on wind. Pearl and grit. Dirt under nails. The tired eye. He shuts them now to smell old wood and resin, others' sweat, the fretboard smoothed by unremembered fingers. Tomorrow Sunday. Suits and organ. Angular beauty of nave and surround. The straight line, the air-dying phrase, the feel of feet on the ground, coins in the plate clinking. Silences. ANGEL AND HOURGLASS No sun lights the stone where the angel dances on the hourglass. She faces the shaded earth where parched birds once in a lifetime maybe, shelter. Her sisters the sun has faded, soft rain and frost taken to themselves, grain by yearly grain. Such a harvest there, where the raised dead wait their spilling onto the streets! It was madness then, that angel to appear, clumsy and strangely radiant among the memento mori. But it was done. DAYBREAK The mist has lifted. Already warm, the pavements gleam in favoured patches and the smoke from last night's celebrations hangs rich in the air. Entries away, a barman is piling a skip with bottles, their clink an occasional music. I keep thinking of those rare discords you passed off as jazz. (You laughed but were surprised when they struck clean.) On such a morning one could wish for sound. No word, sense, noise: just sound, its resonance a space like countryside behind dispersing fog real and inaccurate and full of promise. And before the wish, simply pleasure, odd wakenings collided into chords, warm and inconclusive minor sevenths. Now like a river the town gathers apace, moving away from itself without knowing, as everything on such dismembered nights measure themselves by distance - the gambler's gap between musicians; the split before a chord when everything hangs, and a finger-film of sweat can tilt or right the axis of a song. And where you are the sky spreads evenly, an empyrean gold to blue, time neither puzzle nor sequence. As you bank, the horizon pivots silent and obliging; your path unfogged, curved and certain as a phrase mark or the running swell between shores. You traverse the same daybreak, the same high tide. THREAD "For example, he discovered that one old lady, who had spent the fifty years of her incarceration on the Burgholzli making stitching movements as if she was sewing shoes, had been jilted by her lover just before she became ill: as Jung was able to discover, he was a cobbler." Jung: Anthony Stevens The shoe will not keep away the world any more than the parting air is sewn by the retreating stream which is her sole succour from that day's taste which has never left her; her weaving is a vain spitting out. Although she knows the watching face is kind, the rhythmic, soothing phrase is a babble of the dead. Suddenly sun floods the room with sense, her hand stilled above her head, dust and insects dance unconducted and in this heartbreaking ravelling, every other afternoon those fifty years past, floats like honey or the pained, remembered small of leather, time reasserted in its own annihilation. The gesture is a gesture again, the arm tired, the muscle sore with a freshness that holds every ache not yet experienced and because to come, ever negated. She is back in the safe, work-lit womb of the cobbler's shop, warm with promises and the dizzy, assuring freedom of betrothal. It passes. Light is a reprieve, her hands begin the long swim into grace, into muddied meaning. Winter falls, but gently, the small glitter in her eyes is the last mirroring of that short, shadowed life; if she lives, she will walk among the buds, her arms breaking the mimed silence of wall and still shrub. BIKERS "I cannot think it pedantry that a man desiring to speak (or sing) something important should also desire to speak with certainty." Robert Lowell The bikers rise like horses out of water. They break the ridge of the road on one wheel. Saturday shatters, two young boys powerwashing cars stare, pallid and jealous. The engines die somewhere between hills, some time before the smell of oil and speed. The imagined space they dwindled into stays, an unwanted echo mars the certain rhythm of our plans. Wind-bitten, dizzy with the kind of disappointment that redeems itself in laws, we daydream to the line the machines drummed against our ribs. But they feel nothing, those stiff-solid figures. Frame-welded, wrapped, no breeze flaws face or hands, the roar beneath no more than the briefest flickering of power, they hurtled, locked within the gravity they defy, living on the edge of pain but never nearing any kind of centre, their lives fulfilled by risk. We pass a pub where gleaming bikes are neat as tuxedos on a hire-shop rack; they walk outside, faces framed by froth, their lives by swapped stories and the sure smell of sweat and leather. ROSSNOWLAGH It's only later when in dark you sit under the glass you'd sleepless nights about that all unfolds, and we're sucked back in the swell that nearly took your life, begin to feel that terrible enormity break in on us. No one of them can see how guilt in me pounds like surf; humility that the thought you thought your last should be of me going home without you, not as we then did, skirting the Erne with sleeping, sand-socked kids, red sun low, on the radio the restoration of part of the Thomastown Royal canal, that silence now forever virginal. ITASCA After a long while he stops above the water that was purer once, watches himself looking at the flat, ripple-free reflected chiaroscuro of the Minnesota sky, a statue full-eyed, Unblinking, he dips a finger; water dripping from the lifted tip fractures the face which joins unsettled, cat-like; dark, dense, unmoved, he is back and of a piece with what he tried to scatter. That child he'd hoped to see in the settling refused to come. Again he stirs. The water is decisive: nothing but himself. Beneath a small sudden cloud, the bottom propels into sight, pressing life indifferent to unaccustomed eyes. It comes to him that he is so much past, a past that has rejected him. The lake the same in each particular makes him feel that he has never visited before; the boy he was, layered by refusals to let go, has long escaped. He cools his defeated hands deep, his forearms seem to hinge. He contemplates them browning into dark then lifts them, hands cupped, he wants to feel this water dry again on his cheekbones and forehead but he has lost the knack, his fingers leak. Then he notices the tiny fish, writhe-glinting on his palm. Could he have been so still? It is still, now, so minuscule a mouth to part for air. Pondfish, maybe, or fry biding the pull of the river, never knowing. The hull of his knuckles sinks, his fingers open like lily leaves; the fish surprised by life, and for a moment it floats, side-on, its fullstop eye drinking down the sun. VALEDICTION I remember your parting words "We are never beaten." And though I knew them false I let it go because the sun was full, wild fields in flower, we sharing an instant the spendthrift's optimism. I have a dream of flies about a barn, drowsy, full, where a man may walk unbitten; an illusion not of sun but light's uncertain angle, promising like apple-pink in May. Science says our field had none of the miraculous but miracle enough its name, as this green page whose grain is every pollen cell that aged. We must, now barred, believe that where we live holds every hope sufficient for the past, remembered hedgerows, trackless road-viewed acres forever of a piece. You heard me out, eyes wide with humorous uncertainty. And then you said "Isn't it all for nothing, yours as well as mine?" The honest kick, full-frontal, feared for what it leaves - eye-contact. Maybe so. Humbly. maybe so. But where does that leave the sun, the evening swarm, a shot of beauty in a well-glade; sculpted salt your father left for distant cows, their milk our bones somehow? I turned at the gate, after a final wave, to feed fat roses, their uselessness a kind of affirmation. TYRONE Picture if we can, the view: those hills, no longer blue, their trees peeled like pre-operative skin, are desert ochre. Near, too near, their quilted contours, focused, bare in midday's harsh neutrality. The fabulous he'd sung into fabric of school's brocaded hours were deep dark breakers on a horizon read in dreaming books. Now sun's stripped ditches to a Martian dark, baked lead among the azure wash that was Tyrone, his father told him and names like gold rained through his head, the myth of Ireland and his future. He trembled in his father's hand at the huge earthquake of sight and story, Tyrone an ocean, Ireland, Canaan. Fifty years ago he stood, bike balanced on the wind, out there and looked across the same, a pea- green sea peopled with shingled farms, their gables bobbing gulls. Afraid to venture farther, he came down and ringed himself against Tyrone with knowledge and forgetfulness until those blue waves settled back, becoming more than what they held. The upstairs room, too high, too close, peers on the sides where blue is pared to green-brown bone of sight and age whose scars are purpled threaded veins exploded; the room as sparse and bleak, stripped of the possibility of colour or beginning. Vague as incense, food and varnish drift. UNDER THE IVORY GATE "The beauty of images is situated in front of things, that of ideas behind them." Proust The Skylon in October, a strange hazy mix of the clean and raucous. A footless second-year barges in a circle, eyes fixed, full. Who is he? And that girl whose name darts from a list about to be shredded? A winter war on Proust, wide windows white-shuttered, recall the impractical hiatus that passed for learning those years ago, an absurd cosseted tenure, the kind we vaguely wish our children grudgingly, though, gambling the safe against the futile. Polished music rooms where few notes belled, Led Zeppelin erratically booming from a boarding hall; between such gaping poles no centre held but the comfortable, avoiding blanket of the mundane - lecture, library, pint, the ease of having settled, dream of comely maidens. (Before first term began I'd seen Dev's grave decked with fresh flowers; unironic tricolour-laced laurels leaned against each other like worn-out soldiers. A car handbrake-wheeled unremarkably: this was Dublin. So wide the sky, unpenned by hills, so many trees still full on the avenues. No dreamy, brittle music, no skin-disturbing breeze.) Summers - as they say remembering the scythe- crisp of sunwashed hay - denied us then. We scattered, made a dog-day myth of odd noons patched together. Now memory dies. That boy, that female form engrossed in a thought piercingly hers, were never there, no, never. The dream, like the excuse, has brought alive the lie that beauty co-existing uneasily with truth can body out like Lazarus and simply be: a self to end all selves, a proof from which no soul is safe. Instead we grab at brightness or a dim illumination we hope will soften the enemy hours we fight before lapsing into half- shadow, defeated tones. Such time recalled is filled with darkness now, a state of sore bewilderment. Truth never seemed to stint. But no gate is visible under the ivory gate. MY LITTLE GIRL (from the Latin of Martial) To you, my parents, Fronto and Flacilla, I commend with a kiss my darling and delight, my little girl Erotion. Shelter her from dread of shadows or the horrid jaws of Tartarus. She would have seen just six cold winters had she lived as many days. Let her play, protected by such elders and lisp my name perhaps, in playful chatter. Heap no hard turf on her gentle bones, nor, earth, lie heavy; she was not thus on you.
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