Derek Mahon

A heron-like species, rare visitors, most recent records referring to winter months . . . very active at dusk. —Guide to Irish Birds A sobering thought, the idea of you stretched there, bittern, under a dark sky, your exposed bones yellow too in a ditch among cold stones, ice glittering everywhere on bog and river, the whole unfortunate country frozen over and your voice stilled by enforced sobriety — a thought more wrenching than the fall of Troy because more intimate; for we’d hear your shout of delight from a pale patch of watery sunlight out on the mud there as you took your first drink of the day and now, destroyed by thirst, you lie in brambles while the rats rotate. I’d’ve broken the ice for you, given an inkling; now, had I known it, we might both be drinking and singing too; for ours is the same story. Others have perished — heron, blackbird, thrushes — and lie shivering like you under whin-bushes; but I mourn only the bittern, withdrawn and solitary, who used to carouse alone among the rushes and sleep rough in the star-glimmering bog-drain. It used to be, with characters like us, they’d let us wander the roads in wind and rain or lock us up and throw away the key — but now they have a cure for these psychoses as indeed they do for most social diseases and, rich at last, we can forget our pain. She says I’m done for if I drink again; so now, relieved of dangerous stimuli, as peace with my plastic bottle of H 2 O and the slack strings of insouciance, I sit with bronze Kavanagh on his canal-bank seat not in ‘the tremendous silence of mid-July’ but the fast bright zing of a winter afternoon dizzy with head-set, flash-bulb and digifone, to learn the tao he once claimed as his own and share with him the moor-hen and the swan, the thoughtless lyric of a cloud in the sky and the play of light and shadow on the slow commemorative waters; relax, go with the flow.

(for Philip Haas) The television set hung in its wire-net cage, protected from the flung bottles of casual rage, is fetish and icon providing all we want of magic and redemption, routine and sentiment. The year-old tinsels hang where an unclaimed no-hoper trembles; fly-corpses cling to the grimy flypaper. Manhattan snows swarm on star-boxed waters, steam trails from warm subway ventilators . . . Welcome to the planet, its fluorescent beers buzzing in the desolate silence of the spheres. Slam the door and knock the snow from your shoe, admit that the vast dark at last defeated you. Nobody found the Grail or conquered outer space; join the clientele watching itself increase.

The only reality is the perpetual flow of vital energy. —Montale Spindrift, crustacean patience and a gust of ozone, you come back once more to this dazzling shore, its warm uterine rinse, heart-racing heave and groan. A quick gasp as you slip into the hissing wash, star cluster, dulse and kelp, slick algae, spittle, froth, the intimate slash and dash, hard-packed in the seething broth. Soft water-lip, soft hand, close tug of origin, the sensual writhe and snore of maidenhair and frond, you swim here once more smart as a rogue gene. Spirits of lake, river and woodland pond preside mildly in water never troubled by wind or tide; and the quiet suburban pool is only for the fearful — no wind-wave energies where no sea briar grips and no freak breaker with the violence of the ages comes foaming at the mouth to drown you in its depths. Among pebbles a white conch worn by the suck and crunch, a sandy skull as old as the centuries, in cold and solitude reclines where the moon-magnet shines; but today you swirl and spin in sea water as if, creatures of salt and slime and naked under the sun, life were a waking dream and this the only life.

No wise man ever wished to be younger. — Swift 1 Down the long library each marble bust shines unregarded through a shower of dust where a grim ghost paces for exercise in wet weather: nausea, gout, ‘some days I hardly think it worth my time to rise’. Not even the love of friends can quite appease the vertigo, sore ears and inner voices; deep-draughted rain clouds, a rock lost in space, yahoos triumphant in the marketplace, the isle is full of intolerable noises. 2 Go with the flow; no, going against the grain he sits in his rocking chair with a migraine, a light in the church all day till evensong, the sort of day in which a man might hang. No riding out to bubbling stream and weir, to the moist meadow and white belvedere; on tattling club and coffee house a pox, a confederacy of dunces and mohocks — scholars and saints be d-mn’d, slaves to a hard reign and our own miniature self-regard. 3 We emerge from hibernation to ghetto-blasters much better than our old Sony transistors, consensual media, permanent celebration, share options, electronic animation, wave motion of site-specific daffodils, closed-circuit video in the new hotels; for Niamh and Oisín have come to earth once more with blinding breastplate and tempestuous hair, new festive orthodoxy and ironic icon, their faces lit up like the Book of Kells. 4 Defrosting the goose-skin on Bridget’s daughters spring sunlight sparkles among parking meters, wizards on stilts, witches on circus bikes, jokers and jugglers, twitching plastic snakes, pop music of what happens, throbbing skies, star wars, designer genes, sword sorceries. We’ve no nostalgia for the patristic croziers, fridges and tumble-dryers of former years, rain-spattered cameras in O’Connell St., the sound mikes buffeted by wind and sleet — 5 but this is your birthday and I want to recall a first-floor balcony under a shower of hail where our own rowdy crowd stood to review post-Christian gays cavorting up Fifth Avenue, wise-cracking dialogue as quick and dry as that in The Big Sleep or The Long Goodbye; for we too had our season in Tír na nÓg, a Sacred Heart girl and a Protestant rogue, chill sunshine warming us to the very bone, our whole existence one erogenous zone. 6 I could resign these structures and devices, these fancy flourishes and funny voices to a post-literate, audio-visual realm of uncial fluorescence, song and film, as curious symptoms of a weird transition before we opted to be slaves of fashion — for now, whatever the ancestral dream, we give ourselves to a vast corporate scheme where our true wit is devalued once again, our solitude known only to the rain. 7 The one reality is the perpetual flow, chaos of complex systems. Each generation does what it must; middle age and misanthropy, like famine and religion, make poor copy, and even the present vanishes like snow off a rope, frost off a ditch, ice in the sun — so back to the desktop and the drawing board, prismatic natural light, slow-moving cloud, the waves far-thundering in a life of their own, a young woman hitching a lift on a country road.

A roof over my head, protected from the rain, I’m reading, pilgrim father, your letters to your son and wondering if, unlike you, I should head for home. Escaping the turbulence of this modern Rome in a flurry of skyline views and exploding foam, I can see that 747 in flight over Nova Scotia, Lahinch and Limerick, snoring back to the future; I can see the old stormy island from the air, its meteorological gaiety and despair, some evidence of light industry and agriculture, familiar contours, turfsmoke on field and town; I can even hear the cabin crew’s soft ‘fáilte’ and the strains of ‘My Lagan Love’ as we touch down. A recovering Ulster Protestant from Co. Down, I shall walk the Dublin lanes as the days grow shorter, I who once had poems in The New Yorker, and spend old age, if any, in an old mac with the young audibly sneering behind my back, deafened by seagulls and the playground cries of children — ourselves, once — by perilous seas. Now, listening to the rus-in-urbe, spring-in-winter noise of late-night diners while the temperatures rise and the terrible wind-chill factor abates, I realize the daffodils must be out in ditch and glen and windows soon flung wide to the spring rain; and marvel how, a figure out of the past, an old man in a hurry, you stuck it here to the last, negotiating the icefields of 8th Avenue to die on West 29th of the ‘Asian’ flu. But first you met by chance at the riverside a young woman with a sick child she tried to hide (not out of shame, you felt, but anguished pride), soft-spoken, ‘from Donnybrook’, amid the alien corn. ‘It pained me that her bright image should fade.’ Thus your epiphany, and you wrote to explain: ‘The nightingale sings with its breast against a thorn, it’s out of pain that personality is born.’ Things you understood: children, the human face, ‘something finer than honesty’, the kindness of women and the priority of the real. Things that puzzled you: economy, fear, the argument from design, the need to feel secure, the belief in another world besides this one here. Despite your rationalism, did it ever appear that the universe might be really‘magical’, sir, and you yourself a showing-forth of that soul? ‘Art is dreamland.’ When you rejoined the whole what glimpse was given to you in the black hole? Now, to ‘Yeats, Artist and Writer’, may we add that you were at home here and in human nature but also, in your own words, lived and died like all of us, then as now, ‘an exile and a stranger’?

Walking among my own this windy morning In a tide of sunlight between shower and shower, I resume my old conspiracy with the wet Stone and the unwieldy images of the squinting heart. Once more, as before, I remember not to forget. There is a perverse pride in being on the side Of the fallen angels and refusing to get up. We could all be saved by keeping an eye on the hill At the top of every street, for there it is, Eternally, if irrelevantly, visible — But yield instead to the humorous formulae, The spurious mystery in the knowing nod; Or we keep sullen silence in light and shade, Rehearsing our astute salvations under The cold gaze of a sanctimonious God. One part of my mind must learn to know its place. The things that happen in the kitchen houses And echoing back streets of this desperate city Should engage more than my casual interest, Exact more interest than my casual pity.

(after Saba) Anyone watching you in the water would think: ‘A siren!’ Winner in the women’s swimming event, you seem strange on the screen of my inglorious life. While you smile in triumph I tie a thread, a thin unbreakable thing, to your toe but you stride past without noticing me. Your friends, young like yourself, crowd round and make a noise in the bar; and then just for a moment cloud-shadow, a grave motherly shadow shivers down from your eyebrows to the proud, beautiful chin and joins your rising to my own setting sun.

The bright drop quivering on a thorn in the rich silence after rain, lute music in the orchard aisles, the paths ablaze with daffodils, intrigue and venery in the air à l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the iron hand and the velvet glove — come live with me and be my love. A pearl face, numinously bright, shining in silence of the night, a muffled crash of smouldering logs, bad dreams of courtiers and of dogs, the Spanish ships around Kinsale, the screech-owl and the nightingale, the falcon and the turtle dove — come live with me and be my love.

Nurses and nuns — their sails whiter than those of the yachts in the bay, they come and go on winged feet, most of them, or in sensible shoes. July, and I should be climbing among stones or diving, but for broken bones, from the rocks below. I try to read a new novel set aside; but a sword-swift pain in the left shoulderblade, the result of a tumble in Sheridan Square, makes reading difficult: writing you can do in your head. It starts to rain on the sea, suddenly dark, the pier, the gardens and the church spires of Dun Laoghaire. You would think it was suddenly October as smoke flaps, the yachts tack violently and those caught in the downpour run for cover. But in a few minutes the sun shines again, the leaves and hedges glisten as if with dew in that fragrant freshness after rain when the world seems made anew before confusion, before pain; and I think of you, a funny-face but solemn, with the sharpest mind I know, a thoughtful creature of unconscious grace bent to your books in the sun or driving down to New York for an evening on the town. Doors open wherever you go in that furious place; for you are the light rising on lost islands, the spéir-bhean the old poets saw gleam in the morning mist. When you walk down Fifth Avenue in your lavender suit, your pony eyes opaque, I am the one beside you, and life is bright with the finest and best. And I have seen, as you have not, such is your modesty, men turn to watch your tangle of golden hair, your graceful carriage and unhurried air as if you belonged to history of ‘her story’, that mystery. You might have been a saint or a great courtesan, anachronistic now in some ways, in some ways more up-to-date than the most advanced of those we know. While you sit on your sun-porch in Connecticut re-reading Yeats in a feminist light I am there with you.

(for Seamus Heaney) First time out I was a torc of gold And wept tears of the sun. That was fun But they buried me In the earth two thousand years Till a labourer Turned me up with a pick In eighteen fifty-four. Once I was an oar But stuck in the shore To mark the place of a grave When the lost ship Sailed away. I thought Of Ithaca, but soon decayed. The time that I liked Best was when I was a bump of clay In a Navaho rug, Put there to mitigate The too god-like Perfection of that Merely human artifact. I served my maker well — He lived long To be struck down in Denver by an electric shock The night the lights Went out in Europe Never to shine again. So many lives, So many things to remember! I was a stone in Tibet, A tongue of bark At the heart of Africa Growing darker and darker . . . It all seems A little unreal now, Now that I am An anthropologist With my own Credit card, dictaphone, Army-surplus boots And a whole boatload Of photographic equipment. I know too much To be anything any more; And if in the distant Future someone Thinks he has once been me As I am today, Let him revise His insolent ontology Or teach himself to pray.