from Decadence: 7 — An Bonnán Buí

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perished — heron, blackbird, thrushes — and lie shivering like you under whin-bushes; but I mourn only the bittern, withdrawn and solitary, who used to carouse alone among the rushes and sleep rough in the star-glimmering bog-drain.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.