by Dermot Healy
I had a spring that emptied into memory.
Tongs
My mother sits by the grate
with a newspaper pressed
like a sail sheet
against the tall tongs.
Behind, the fire whooshes
as the draught ascends.
When the flames have taken
she lifts her feet
onto the lower mantel,
legs splayed neatly
before the open hearth.
She drops asleep
without her glasses on, mouth open
like a singer taking
a breath, and the hands in her lap
form a cup
into which passing strangers
might have put
some small token.
She is sleeping
between shifts.
Her chair is tilted.
One little toe in the brown nylon
is bandaged.
On the green fire-tiles
her two shoes.
In the nook the long-legged tongs.
On the window the bars.
When We Talk of What’s Out There
When we talk of what’s out there
inside us the real thing goes on
being said. ‘Will you stop your snivelling,’
the dying woman said to the husband by her bed,
‘you’re making a fool of me.’ Then she went off
to the place she feared most. And so the outpourings
of the normal save us from despair. ‘The nights
are drawing in,’ says a man as he looks
at his beasts. And what he means is all of this
won’t last. ‘Venus, I think,’ the woman says, looking up,
but she might as well have said I have not slept
since John went. So do not speak of despair. Tell me
of one solitary object I can hold on to.
Give me its name. Watch how he sleeps,
the man who has cursed God.
He is holy and absolute in sleep.
Those Days
Those days
I could not pass a house
where a child was crying
without wanting to run.
Run where?
There is nowhere to run
after you leave a daughter,
after you leave a son.
And what have they lost?
A ghost typing
in the spare room
knowing that
with every year
an old tenderness
is fading. The early days
grow so distant they hurt,
and when we meet
it’s like old people
who knew eachother
when they were young,
so far back
they have to begin
inventing it, that
awesome past,
and you think you
will never get over it,
the loss at your side
just here,
waist-level.
The Reed Bed
1
So it is with the reeds. I pass them daily
but the minute I’ve gone by
and the rustling stops
somewhere behind me
among the floating trees,
they no longer exist,
and then I start
wondering what is it I lost,
what was that thing,
that important thing,
I left behind me
on the dreaming road?
2
And then comes the moment
when returning home
I turn perchance their way
and there they are,
the familiars I lost
that morning,
sifting, by the dark tree
that marks the edge
of their watery bed,
a tossed acre of amber reeds
feather-headed,
frail, summoning.
3
And this is when
they truly exist,
when you come
upon them
at the last moment
and the eye
suddenly catches them
nodding in their bed
of cinnamon,
getting ready
in a flurry of whispering
to leave you again.
Only Just
1
… When night falls
the day passes
over Helen’s child face
and she is back in a pram
or in a pink-laced cot
under a table,
there’s washing in the air,
Saturday’s midday news,
a plain ceiling,
then somewhere
near five
you toss suddenly
and scream
as they bury you
alive, in a wet grave …
2
… Wakening you
is like pulling someone
out of surging waters,
you flounder
with wild eyes
in the bed, say thanks,
and take my hand
and squeeze it
with trust,
then fall back in
to the deep
with a sigh.
The spear thrown
by ancestors misses
the sleeper, only just …
3
… Now your pillow is full of sleep
while mine is
awake all night.
Whoever the other fellow is
who dreams in me
he cannot be worse
than myself
when I cannot
rest. I’m on duty
at the gate
of a tremendous city
where complaints
and crazies
are on the go
till the early hours …
4
… When you get up
my shift is over. I fall
into your heat
and your shape;
above me is
the plain ceiling;
the news is on
in the distance. I slip
my head onto your pillow
to hear bird talk
from the garden
and what, for a second,
it is like to beat
in silence against
the wet coffin …
The Task
Go down into the dab with the rock,
I’m told, go down into the dab,
right down into the blue dab
is the job,
it’s there you’ll find
purchase for a wall,
man dear,
again’ the say.
I’m down in the dab for hours
before I take a break to see
how far there is to go. Right
round the alt and on forever,
and I realise he’s set me
a task for a lifetime, that man,
that man who sent me
down into the dab
to hoke
again’ the ocean.
I tell myself be patient.
Carry smaller stones
but carry some.
Don’t go,
you fool,
with nothing in your arms.
Chalkey’s Grave
The moon came in on the ebb,
jib-sail aloft,
and filling fast
chased through
the blotted sky
sending every shadow
towards us,
raced across the troughs
and bar, the broken plough,
abandoned car,
as if this must be got
over with quick,
this torrid century
and the next:
then on her side
she stopped
to dock
a moment in
a flood
of winter
stars, everything
fell into
oblivion, the spade
moved back
from the house
and stood still
as sentinel
and dule-tree
at the spot in the garden
where I had
jammed it
into the dank earth,
not a bark to be heard
on the headland,
not a bark
from the house,
nothing, as the moon
passed overhead.
For a while
everything was upright,
then, as the shadow
of the spade’s lean handle
started slowly back
across the garden
sheds and walls
went on the move,
the wee bare sycamore began
to climb,
the moon went in behind
a cloud
and doused the glim;
down, dog, down.
Then the moon swung above
my trousers on the line
and went beyond the vests
and shirts and turf,
the tin rooves
and lewing cows,
till, with sea-cloud trailing
in her wake,
at the alt
she took a look
at Horse Island,
lit the salt
in Moffit’s field,
the wall of cockle
brightened
and the long shadow
of the gallows spade
crossed
the loose earth upon
the dog’s grave.
It’s done: turning west
she baled light
onto the Yellow Strand
and, lightened
of her load,
went on.
Who is That?
Who is that at the door?
The cat with a young lark in her mouth.
And that?
The thump of colour on a boulder.
Who is breathing?
Everywhere light is breathing fast.
It’s breathing on gulls,
on ravens that stroll the burst sea-bed.
What is that on the sand?
The light that carries sound inland.
And the shriek?
The shriek is a warning.
Even the warm sun in the mist
is a warning.
Who is that at the door?
The cat with a young lark in her mouth.
A Warning
1
I see it happening
again, all that happened
last night,
numerous times,
many nights,
the same ravine,
the same attempt
to save myself …
2
Till I realise at last
that dreams
go over it
word for word,
that perilous descent
we make each night
to hear
the warning.
3
A warning has been
sent to me
from where things
happen over and over
and then once
only, and continues
even as I write
these words down.
Sunday, 16 August 1998
In Omagh
on a deserted street just after dawn
there was no one abroad
but some lone cameraman
taking a shot for the news. And at a slight incline
above the piled debris
the only thing still working
beyond his lens
was the traffic lights.
And there, though no car stirred,
the lights went red,
the lights went green,
and red, and green again;
for Stop, though no one stopped,
for Go, though no one went,
nor stopped, nor went again.
Undisturbed by all that happened
the lights still kept urging traffic
through the crack that opened
between ten-after-three
and eternity. And then they went faster
as if the bomb had damaged time itself,
then slowed again as if somehow they could
go back to normality.
Then faster still, the light for Stop,
the light for Go, the light for Stop,
the light for Go, the light for Stop,
for Stop, for Stop, for Stop.
Alas
In the dead house
pictures have been
turned to the wall
and the mirror
sheeted
with a pillow slip
in which
you can trace
the faint outline
of the sleeping head
that once lightly rested
there, and
the chant of prayer
rises for fear
we might hear
the unmilked cow
lewing in the flooded
haggard,
and again —
there it is —
the shake in the hand
of the bereaved
repeating itself
as she steadies
her fingers
upon the forehead
of the beloved
like someone, alas,
finding
balance
The West End
in memory of Douglas
Good day, mister, I say.
Good day to you, sir, he calls back
and salutes, a sharp snap of the full hand
to the forehead, then we trundle by eachother
on the beach road.
And this went on for several winters,
the salute, himself and his dog, and after that dog
another, the two of them braving sleet
and churlish wind,
and he always calling me sir!
Sometimes I’d meet him dropping into Ellen’s
for crisps and fags. And heading West
he’d lift his bald terrier to let a car pass.
After the worst storms he’d appear on the road
carrying shopping home.
Then one day I learnt that he had worked
next door to me in Picadilly years before
and so I stopped up to tell him the news.
He looked at me for some time.
Are you the author? he asked.
I am, I said. So what happened, he said,
that we found ourselves in this dreadful place?
The want of wit, I think, he said,
and he headed off to his caravan
in the dank West.
And so for some years here we were
far from Eros and all the girls,
the Classic cinemas, the strip joints,
hamburger stalls, the French House,
Wardour Street, Ward’s,
of no consequence to each other
except for that co-incidence in the sixties.
We share a past, mine more sordid than his
perhaps. Men from office days
in the West End
tipping outdoors when rain is finished
into another West where the murder of the sea
is news, or mud-wrestlers in Jordan’s,
and now and then, a squad car on the dunes.
We know few here
except those we took with us.
Good day, sir, I call. Good day to you, sir, he calls,
and leans back and salutes
like a book that always
opens
at the right page.
All Soul’s Day, November 1998
The Words
The rain started slowly,
began with a single perfect drop
that took an age
to run down a page,
then came another and another
till the glass was streaming.
Soon the hail was peppering the lakes
and driving across the Atlantic;
a cloud-burst
struck the wide empty desert;
a bullfrog
sang,