Derek Mahon

Surely you paused at this roadside oasis In your nomadic youth, and saw the mound Of never-used cement, the curious faces, The soft-drink ads and the uneven ground Rainbowed with oily puddles, where a snail Had scrawled its slimy, phosphorescent trail. Like a frontier store-front in an old western It might have nothing behind it but thin air, Building materials, fruit boxes, scrap iron, Dust-laden shrubs and coils of rusty wire, A cabbage-white fluttering in the sodden Silence of an untended kitchen garden — Nirvana! But the cracked panes reveal a dark Interior echoing with the cries of children. Here in this quiet corner of Co. Cork A family ate, slept, and watched the rain Dance clean and cobalt the exhausted grit So that the mind shrank from the glare of it. Where did they go? South Boston? Cricklewood? Somebody somewhere thinks of this as home, Remembering the old pumps where they stood, Antique now, squirting juice into a cream Lagonda or a dung-caked tractor while A cloud swam on a cloud-reflecting tile. Surely a whitewashed sun-trap at the back Gave way to hens, wild thyme, and the first few Shadowy yards of an overgrown cart track, Tyres in the branches such as Noah knew — Beyond, a swoop of mountain where you heard, Disconsolate in the haze, a single blackbird. Left to itself, the functional will cast A death-bed glow of picturesque abandon. The intact antiquities of the recent past, Dropped from the retail catalogues, return To the materials that gave rise to them And shine with a late sacramental gleam. A god who spent the night here once rewarded Natural courtesy with eternal life — Changing to petrol pumps, that they be spared For ever there, an old man and his wife. The virgin who escaped his dark design Sanctions the townland from her prickly shrine. We might be anywhere but are in one place only, One of the milestones of earth-residence Unique in each particular, the thinly Peopled hinterland serenely tense — Not in the hope of a resplendent future But with a sure sense of its intrinsic nature.

What night-rule now about this haunted grove? The spirits have dispersed, the woods faded to grey from midnight blue leaving a powdery residue, night music fainter, frivolous gods withdrawing, cries of yin and yang, discords of the bionic young; cobweb and insects, hares and deer, wild strawberries and eglantine, dawn silence of the biosphere, amid the branches a torn wing — what is this enchanted place? Not the strict groves of academe but an old thicket of lost time too cool for school, recovered space where the brain yields to nose and ear, folk remedy and herbal cure, old narratives of heart and hand, and a dazed donkey, starry eyed, with pearls and honeysuckle crowned, beside her naked nibs is laid. Wild viruses, Elysian fields — our own planet lit by the fire of molten substance, constant flux, hot ice and acrobatic sex, the electric moth-touch of desire and a new vision, a new regime where the white blaze of physics yields to yellow moonlight, dance and dream induced by what mind-altering drug or rough-cast magic realism; till morning bright with ant and bug shines in a mist of glistening gism, shifting identities, mutant forms, angels evolved from snails and worms.

Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels. — Seferis , Mythistorema (for J. G. Farrell) Even now there are places where a thought might grow — Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned To a slow clock of condensation, An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft, Indian compounds where the wind dances And a door bangs with diminished confidence, Lime crevices behind rippling rain barrels, Dog corners for bone burials; And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford, Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel, Among the bathtubs and the washbasins A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole. This is the one star in their firmament Or frames a star within a star. What should they do there but desire? So many days beyond the rhododendrons With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud, They have learnt patience and silence Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood. They have been waiting for us in a foetor Of vegetable sweat since civil war days, Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure Of the expropriated mycologist. He never came back, and light since then Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain. Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something — A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane. There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking Into the earth that nourished it; And nightmares, born of these and the grim Dominion of stale air and rank moisture. Those nearest the door grow strong — ‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’ The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling Utensils and broken pitchers, groaning For their deliverance, have been so long Expectant that there is left only the posture. A half century, without visitors, in the dark — Poor preparation for the cracking lock And creak of hinges; magi, moonmen, Powdery prisoners of the old regime, Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream At the flash-bulb firing-squad we wake them with Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms. Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms, They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith. They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way, To do something, to speak on their behalf Or at least not to close the door again. Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii! ‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say, ‘Let the god not abandon us Who have come so far in darkness and in pain. We too had our lives to live. You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary, Let not our naive labours have been in vain!’

There is an old statue in the courtyard that weeps, like Niobe, its sorrow in stone. The griefs of the ages she has made her own. Her eyes are rain-washed but not hard, her body is covered in mould, the garden overgrown. One by one the first lights come on, those that haven’t been on all night. Christmas, the harshly festive, has come and gone. No snow, but the rain pours down in the first hour before dawn, before daylight. Swift’s home for ‘fools and mad’ has become the administrative block. Much there has remained unchanged for many a long year — stairs, chairs, Georgian widows shafting light and dust, of the satirist; but the real hospital is a cheerful modern extension at the back hung with restful reproductions of Dufy, Klee and Braque. Television, Russian fiction, snooker with the staff, a sifter of Lucozade, a paragraph of Newsweek or the Daily Mail are my daily routine during the festive season. They don’t lock the razors here as in Bowditch Hall. We have remained upright — though, to be frank, the Christmas dinner scene, with grown men in their festive gear, was a sobering sight. I watch the last planes of the year go past, silently climbing a cloud-lit sky. Earth-bound, soon I’ll be taking a train to Cork and trying to get back to work at my sea-lit, fort-view desk in the turf-smoky dusk. Meanwhile, next door, a visiting priest intones to a faithful dormitory. I sit on my Protestant bed, a make-believe existentialist, and stare the clouds of unknowing. We style, as best we may, our private destiny; or so it seems to me as I chew my thumb and try to figure out what brought me to my present state — an ‘educated man’, a man of consequence, no bum but one who has hardly grasped what life is about, if anything. My children, far away, don’t know where I am today, in a Dublin asylum with a paper whistle and a mince pie, my bits and pieces making a home from home. I pray to the rain-clouds that they never come where their lost father lies; that their mother thrives; and that I may measure up to them before I die. Soon a new year will be here demanding, as before, modest proposals, resolute resolutions, a new leaf, new leaves. This is the story of my life, the story of all lives everywhere, mad fools whatever we are, in here or out there. Light and sane I shall walk down to the train, into that world whose sanity we know, like Swift to be a fiction and a show. The clouds part, the rain ceases, the sun casts now upon everyone its ancient shadow.

(for James Simmons) 1 I wake in a dark flat To the soft roar of the world. Pigeons neck on the white Roofs as I draw the curtains And look out over London Rain-fresh in the morning light. This is our element, the bright Reason on which we rely For the long-term solutions. The orators yap, and guns Go off in a back street; But the faith doesn’t die That in our time these things Will amaze the literate children In their non-sectarian schools And the dark places be Ablaze with love and poetry When the power of good prevails. What middle-class shits we are To imagine for one second That our privileged ideals Are divine wisdom, and the dim Forms that kneel at noon In the city not ourselves. 2 I am going home by sea For the first time in years. Somebody thumbs a guitar On the dark deck, while a gull Dreams at the masthead, The moon-splashed waves exult. At dawn the ship trembles, turns In a wide arc to back Shuddering up the grey lough Past lightship and buoy, Slipway and dry dock Where a naked bulb burns; And I step ashore in a fine rain To a city so changed By five years of war I scarcely recognize The places I grew up in, The faces that try to explain. But the hills are still the same Grey-blue above Belfast. Perhaps if I’d stayed behind And lived it bomb by bomb I might have grown up at last And learnt what is meant by home.

They said I got away in a boat And humbled me at the inquiry. I tell you I sank as far that night as any Hero. As I sat shivering on the dark water I turned to ice to hear my costly Life go thundering down in a pandemonium of Prams, pianos, sideboards, winches, Boilers bursting and shredded ragtime. Now I hide In a lonely house behind the sea Where the tide leaves broken toys and hatboxes Silently at my door. The showers of April, flowers of May mean nothing to me, nor the Late light of June, when my gardener Describes to strangers how the old man stays in bed On seaward mornings after nights of Wind, takes his cocaine and will see no one. Then it is I drown again with all those dim Lost faces I never understood, my poor soul Screams out in the starlight, heart Breaks loose and rolls down like a stone. Include me in your lamentations.