Today is my Sixty-Ninth Birthday

Also my First Day as a Sculptor.

I offer my first work as a birthday greeting to myself.

Only Sixty-Nine yet. Three Score and Ten is far beyond the foaming shore seen here in the distant background.

Oíche na Scuaibeanna Fada 2

Wurra Wurra: The Night of the Long Brooms (Part Two)
(translated from the Irish of Micheál MacSolamh “Oíche na Scuaibeanna Fada”)

In the press there are days folded like clean linen
waiting for the dirt.
Inside the closet
a clock keeps ticking
and they say it is only a matter of time.

Broomsticks I saw first.
Glowing like iron rods under a blacksmith’s bellows,
red as the geraniums in my window alcove
they moved towards me out of the darkness.

And then three women, naked and wild as the storm driven wind in the chimney’s breast stepping in on this Night of the Dead and of all the Holy Saints stealthily, rag-haired, broom-clad, besom-handed, bucket swinging, brush proud. From the black shadows they drove the ciarógs and the clocks and the millipedes and the wood lice and the silverfish and the daddy long-legs and the black spiders, herding them silently out of this sad and dusty bachelor gaff and off its surface of unswept regret. For this is the echoless hole of entropy that a connubial extraction leaves behind. Since our separation it has been mine.

Broomsticks I saw first.
Glowing like iron rods under a blacksmith’s bellows,
red as the geraniums in my window alcove
they moved towards me out of the darkness.

In the press there are days folded like clean linen waiting for the dirt.
In the closet
a clock keeps ticking.
and they say it is only a matter of time.

Works in Progress 3

Wurra Wurra: The Night of the Long Brooms (Part One)
© Mike Absalom 1 November 2009
(translated from the Irish of Micheál MacSolamh “Oíche na Scuaibeanna Fada”)

Broomsticks I saw first.
Glowing like iron rods under a blacksmith’s bellows,
red as the geraniums in my window alcove
they moved towards me out of the darkness.

I am not yet three score and ten years of age. In spite of my piercing gaze which has the diamantine glitter of a snake’s eye, and despite the silver halo wreathing my skull in eleventh hour blossom like a thorn bush that doesn’t give a tinker’s curse it has missed spring, but extrudes flowers like sausages willy-nilly all over the place whatever the damn season, I am not yet three score and ten years of age.

The skin of my skull is wrinkled with savage furrows that make me look as wise in ejaculation as a puffball on a lawn trampled by children.
I am not wise at all, but that is neither here nor there.
I am not yet three score and ten years of age either.
Broomsticks I saw first.
Glowing like iron rods under a blacksmith’s bellows,
red as the geraniums in my window alcove
they moved towards me out of the darkness.

The Old Testament says three score and ten is my sell-by date.
But I am not there yet and so we have no earthly reason to speak of Testaments. Or panic.
Broomsticks I saw first
Glowing like iron rods under a blacksmith’s bellows,
red as the geraniums in my window alcove
they moved towards me out of the darkness.
I will not deny though that a birthday is upon me soon,
but it is merely the three score and ninth.
As numbers go I have no problem with this one. It is depressing, but only vaguely so, like the idea of caterpillars visiting my library or an invitation to play a round of golf in

winter.
I would not call the number 69 an apocalyptic statement.
Broomsticks I saw first.
Glowing like iron rods under a blacksmith’s bellows,
red as the geraniums in my window alcove
they moved towards me out of the darkness.

The Booty of Poetry

The Booty of Poetry

The booty of poetry
for him
was always girls.

Laurels were secondary.
He enjoyed the taste of words. He enjoyed mouthing them.
He enjoyed the intimate touch that came with their transmission.
When the coffee break arrived
the sweet taste of enticement was still in his mouth,
like the sugar around a donut.
There was no stopping it.

The booty of poetry
for him
was always girls.

It worked of course.
That was the beauty of it.

Dead Instruments and the Scent of Flowers

A blind man jumped over a cliff towards the scent of flowers.
Is this retirement?

Only half blind
I felt the weaker pull.
I put up my fiddle
and pushed my harp into a corner.
It looks good there.
Its polished black walnut skin
displays my dust collection to a T.

I am often woken in the night
as yet another string snaps angrily in its sad redundancy
and gives up the ghost with a crack.
Gutless harp.

Although not quite.

During the day if I pass by absentmindedly close
the viper teeth of string ends nip playfully at my flesh
hoping I will catch tetanus.

Like the blind man I jumped over a cliff.

As I fall
the scent of flowers is not getting any stronger.

The Whitby Dracula 1977 (Halloween Nostalgia)

Dracula Whitbyiensis (The Whitby Dracula)

By the light
Of the silvery moon

I importune
Pretty maidens, who swoon at what I'm doin'.

Then off I zoom

to my room with a tomb.
Just popped out for a bite.

Did I give you a fright?

I'll be back again soon,
By the light of the moon.

By the light
Of the silvery stars

Outside the graveyard I pause

With someone's throat in my jaws.
(Oh! Let my dentures dent yours!)

Singing this refrain

In a jocular vein:

A drop or two of you will see me through;

Can you lend me a spoon?

By the light of the moon.

In my cloak and hat
With my little pet bat

What an aristocrat!
Who can guess what I'm at?
(Assault and battery that's what! )
As I flit

Across the moon I'm well lit:

I had a little haemorrhage

I've been keeping in the fridge!

I'm going to croon

By the light of the moon.

c. Mike Absalom 1977

Works in Progress 2

Skeleton Pods

In the garden
the scrag ends of lupins
with skeleton pods rattling all around me
remind that
the tumble towards something awful
never stops.

However,
strapped to a chair
in this garden,
on this lawn,
among these flowers,
under this bottomless sky,
I will probably fall
for ever,
and avoid it.

Works in Progress 1

Woman Unfinished Under Water

Sometimes
I would like to know
if I have a swimming disability
or if I am simply
drowning.

Intermission Waiting

Intermission Waiting for Words

I've been away writing and drawing. Back soon.

“Is Éireannach me!”

“Is Éireannach me!”

Silently imputing crimes of an unspecified nature to my accent, a man in spectacles spoke to me at the bar. -So ye are not of these parts? There was a dark and hooded manner on him. He stood stiff at his drink, balaclava black, shielding his eyes behind his glass. Although he spoke, it was clear he was closed to me and as uninviting in his welcome as a pub window seen from the street of a strange town. I hesitate to use my hippy word negativity, but in his case the ayes did not have it. His eyes had something quite else. Although vitreous, they were still able to convey an icy cold bundled in smouldering aggression. Not a gunman, I could see that at once. Not a professional. Just a loose provincial cannon. A sráid bhaile dreamer. He seemed to be a man who had stepped out of darkness and found only darkness. He had tasted history at tenth hand and it left a bitter and unsatisfied taste in his mouth. I knew him. He had been loitering here with intent for generations. Much has been said of the passage of time, but there are people in Ireland for whom time does not pass. It stagnates only and when it stagnates it breeds strange monsters. There is no passage for them. They lurk in the back passage, waiting, for what, they do not know. Until they think this might be it. I think he thought I might be it.

I looked him up and down. He was not one of them. This place was too far from the border. And anyway, the discipline was lacking. When you are an amadán yourself it is not hard to recognise another eejit, as long as you are not a total amadán. Perhaps he was not a total eejit. Perhaps his need for satisfaction was too great to be ignored. Perhaps in his family the anti-Christs de Valera and McQuaid had been worshipped as a matter of course.

I myself have always considered myself to be a gentleman, but certainly not a seoinín. But I was raised over the water. Over a lot of water. You would not be able to put a finger on my accent by now. And I do not warm to finger pointers, particularly if we have not been formally introduced.

My appearance and perhaps my Anglo-elocution belie me. I may seem on the surface to be a gentleman but I have recently come to the conclusion that in spite of an earlier squeaky-clean self-image, I am actually not at heart a gentleman and certainly not a gentle man.
At the age of twelve I always carried a brass knuckleduster in the top pocket of my beautifully tailored hand-me-down tweed hunting jacket and had considered sewing razor blades into the lining of my lapels had not my teenage years been full of forced and enjoyable violence in the OTC where I found brens and stens and two-inch mortars both delightfully destructive, satisfying, and legal to boot.

-Is Éireannach me! I said, and broke his glasses.

So this was Agincourt.
Or Gettysburg.
Or Arnhem.
Or, who knows?
Some long remembered battlefield,
Scarred and somewhat canonized,
With a brazen plaque.

There was a stone wall, I recall,
And approaching it,
Unarmed,
A meadow.

It was a garden in June,
Boughed with the weight of Summer,
Bound down with honeysuckle
and purple ropes of blackberry,
Breathing slowly out its perfumed breath,
Watching the swallows.

And then,
Like a stray bullet,
A hummingbird ricochet’d behind my ears,
And I threw myself down
And felt the warm earth sigh.

As I Walked Out in Galway City

It is a hangover. I thought it was the weather until I tried to rise. Cramps in my calf muscles as if a butcher were trying to strip them slowly from the bone. Homemade Strawberry Wine from a shop in Shop Street in Galway City. Köstliche Träume alone late at night on a sofa with a good film, Australian (the film) and delightful. It bulged with unrequited love like an Elizabethan codpiece and with what the euphemist these days calls scenes of a graphic nature. I suppose it is because the action goes off the graph in matters of body ripping and bottom slapping. Should they not be called scenes of an ungraphic or transgraphic or hypographic nature? Good old rumpety-pumpety anyway, and much kitchen vulgarity in the style of New South Wales suburban, the whole ending with a murder (brutal of course) and kisses and hugs all round back at the Outback. That’s my cup of Fosters! Though originating from down-under in that far-off austral landmass which appears to those who have only seen it on maps to be a capsized continent and possibly sinking to boot (or is that New Zealand?) this was nevertheless a happy film devoid of kangaroos. Thus it confounded my I’m-on-top-of-the-world prejudice. I like a dénouement where the women are gráphicly satisfied (we all like a bit of the grá and what am I but a gráfic artist anyway) and afterwards all the men get pushed off a cliff. When they fall for a long time unrepentative and then go splat at the bottom, well, could one ask for more? Not my own nemesis, though. That is more vice-versa. This after all is not a pipe! It is only a pipe dream.

And as for pipe dreams, let us begin one:

The Bog Crocodile
The Bog Crocodile opened an eye and surveyed for a moment the lazy surface of the pool that stretched away from him in two placid directions between yellow orchids and purple willow herb. No change in the familiar surroundings was apparent and this was enough to ensure the unrelenting somnolence of the other eye. Yet something must have prompted this tiny shift in his awareness. The Bog Crocodile was not given to idle speculation. Indeed he was not given to speculation of any kind whatsoever. The Bog Crocodile was certain. He was, one might say, sufficient in himself. Like the Universe.
It was clear to him that the orange waters flowing imperceptively today over his loggy bulk still slid past with the same immeasurable sloth as ever. The air hung motionless from a pig skin yellow sky, as though too tired to breathe. Even when an infantile puff of breeze, scarcely awake at this early hour, accidentally set the cotton heads nodding, it seemed nothing more than an affirmation of the never ending changelessness of things.
However at this moment deep beneath his unsuspecting certainty, from turfy depths where the black mash of sunlight and centuries lay fermenting into fire, a silver bubble as large and wobbly as a juggler’s dinner plate rose slowly towards the light.

Silent and treacherous, it broke surreptitiously upon the surface of the pool with the false politeness of an embarrassed guest struggling to divert attention from a smelly indiscretion at the dinner table.
An old spider knitting quietly in a clump of marsh marigolds sensed a twang of change register on his web. Peering to the right and to the left he strengthened his grasp on his silver ladder and a moment later felt the reeds twitch as a strange ripple passed them by. It brought with it an old, old smell, and made him think of dead flies, and long forgotten banquets in buzzing bluebottle halls, and the cobwebby paradise of ruined cottages and abandoned barns mouldering into the earth. It was the smell of arum lily and graves. It had a toadstool quality, even more pungent at first than that of the flowers in which he kept his deadly traps.
From a vantage point high above the wetland a sharp eyed bird of prey noticed the waters ripple and break. She wheeled for a moment treading the high breeze expectantly.
Below her the Bog Crocodile closed both eyes in defiance and took a deep and considered breath. “I smell,” he thought with the assurance of age if not of wisdom, “I smell something very rotten.” In pontifical solemnity he slowly licked his lips.

(From "An Leabhar Dubh agus Geal - Stories from my Linocuts". The Bog Crocodile Chapter One. Unfinished. But all suggestions for the continuation of this tale welcomed. I know what is going to happen. But perhaps you know better?)

Blow-in in the Wind

I say I am alone on this bog, but that is not strictly true. From out of the changing populations of farm animals people often emerge. Horses and cows, ponies and donkeys: of course there would have to be ownership upon them as there is upon every scrap of this bog. Even the commonage is tugged at in covetous directions by a whole handful of wary families. But the people here are not obvious. They appear suddenly as figures from a mist in the morning. They rise silently from the reeds. They move slowly along bog tracks, emerging unobtrusively out of rocks and scraw. They are sleight of hand beings. First you do not see them and then you do. They invest the loneliness of the bog with a loneliness of another kind.

These people are not casually in place on the land. They are rooted. When they show they occupy themselves intently with this task or that one as if the survival of the very earth gods depended upon it. Perhaps it does. To fill a gap in a ditch with an iron bedstead could be considered either an act of vandalism or a piece of planned recycling. But then again, their ancestor cast iron blades into sacred pools and propitiated gods who in all probability still lurk today in the blackthorn thicket among the bitter sloes. To me this smacks if not of worship then at least of divine appeasement.

In this corner it is hard to discover what lies behind any action. Life goes on, and I suppose it must seem to have a purpose. I am told there is no profit in cattle. I am also told, in a rhetorical kind of way, for I do not know the answer and am certainly not expected to know it: -but if there is no profit in cattle where does the money come from for a hundred and fifty thousand euros worth of truck and trailer? Don’t ask me. I use a spade and grow beans and potatoes.

To me they are mysterious characters, these emergents from the mist. I know nothing of the social structure in which they are embedded and I am ignorant of their personal histories. Scraps of gossip reach me blown in on the bog wind and shredded and distorted by the journey. But it is I who am the blow-in here and probably I could not even imagine their true stories.
Until only recently they lived far far back in time while I was gallivanting the world and witnessing what has become history.

They lived without electricity, water, telephone. They had an earth floor to walk on, an open fire to warm by, an iron pot to cook in and they shat in the barn. Perhaps. Why should they tell me the truth? Why should they? I myself travelled from far away 35 years ago to kiss the Blarney Stone. Ever since it has stood me in very good stead. You might or might not call me a liar but Truth like any saleable commodity needs to be pampered and arranged to the best advantage if someone is to buy it at all at all. Oh I know! Truth is not for sale! But do you buy that? Do you really buy that? Everything has a price, and so does everyone. It is the Market Economy. So what has a price must be for sale. Market my words. On this island blarney is in the water supply and as endemic as coliform bacteria. Words are alive inside.Children, working their fingers raw and their muscles sore. I see them grown to adulthood and standing before me and sometimes they may speak. About the weather. About their cattle. About their tastes or lack of in vegetables, in shopping, in.....who knows? I am limited in my way and they are limited in theirs. The world is narrow if you want it to be. Narrow is a safe place. Straight and narrow, well that is something else about me and my life. Veiled of course, as everybody veils their life here.

Among these wraiths is Attracta McCabe. Her land is scattered all around the bog like a torn up document. In the same way she scatters her ten cows, moving them daily the way a farmer might scatter his seeds at planting time, from one inherited bog field to another, as if the Land Registry had never bothered to clump them together into usable sizes. She is a strong and handsome woman, beautiful one might say, with a sad faraway look as if she suspects there is a world out there away from the bog, snippets of news of which reach her from time to time, and which she knows she will never experience. She does not drive. She has a large almost grown family who are becoming of the outside world, of college and job and the internet. She cares for them and her husband and her ten coweens.

I see her at evening bringing the cows home, walking along the bóithrín, she and they silhouetted against the evening sky, light stick in her hand, walking with them gently but with the majesty of Queen Maedbh. Sometimes, later, in my headlights, returning from a gathering I come across her lit up in her reflective jacket by my beam like a sudden lighthouse, cowering blinded back into the drain as we meet, she returning from putting them away for the night or checking a broken ditch. Beautiful and sad.

Schwantz has encountered her too. His eyes glitter when they meet.
–How is my sweet honeysuckle of the lane, he whispers, listening to be sure his voice does not carry over the bog amphitheatre to her family house or the conch-eared neighbours tuned to every variation in a frequency that scarcely changes from one moment to another.
– The Queen of the Bogland with her prize bulls! The divil is in him then. I hear him. He is on his way here and a whisper is louder than the wind down my slope.
I do not know her thoughts. She moves with the cows year in year out like the swaying of the ash branches, in tune with the place, but not unmoved by the wind. She balances on a fine edge. It would be cruel to tip her. To set her wobbling.

Schwantz Drinking Schwantz Dreaming

The Entrance of the Gadfly

Professor Schwantz samples and later puts paid to a bottle of very questionable poitín laid down under the turf lumps in the fuel shed last winter by myself to be used in case of emergency as a possible rat deterrent. It in no way deters him and he soon sinks softly and for once utterly silently (silence with no sort of utterance is a miracle in the case of Schwantz) into the soft plenitude of my padded writing chair. He now slowly flows out in all directions at once like spilt pancake mix on a tabletop as he travels to that ethereal ‘other place’ we visit when putting pen to paper or brush to canvas. Along with the poitín, and according to his own characteristic predilections, he is subsumed into the bravado and impertinence of a gadfly-in-love and dreams a dream of implausible omnipotence and rattling good yarn-ness.

You will note, reader, gentle or otherwise, that this is a blog, and in a blog everything is backwards. That is to say today’s instalment will be yesterday’s tomorrow and tomorrow’s will be today’s when the present one is yesterday’s. This should help you understand what is unfolding but it is only a part of the paradox of the space-time-continuum and really nothing at all to do with me.

First Appearance of the Gadfly

At that moment there was a small commotion in an adjoining clump of reeds. A gaudy personage poked his head into sight. He seemed not to notice the presence of the Spider and with bravura addressed himself to the Fly.
-Madam, he said, inclining his head in a most genteel manner, -I knew you would be here.
He raised his gaze and turning his eyes like a heliotrope in her direction, winked salaciously through a thousand lenses.
-Well, thought the Fly, -who is this then?
-I, said the newcomer, as if reading her thoughts, -am the Gadfly.
And emerging from the rush stalks he bowed again, this time a full and aristocratic bending from the waist, and smiled condescendingly as if bestowing his flattery upon the whole forest.

The Fly noticed that he was certainly beautiful to behold. He smiled out from a strong moustachioed visage and wore a gleaming black neckerchief studded with what appeared to be diamond pins. Below this his wrestler’s chest was encased in a turquoise breastplate from which dangled an extraordinary array of brightly coloured ribbons and bronze campaign medals. Fine veined wings of opal hue and iridescent gauze and a blue flashing cloak which winked and shimmered like a lighthouse in the shadows of the rush bed completed this first, and, in her opinion, very favourable impression.

It seemed to the Fly that the sun was suddenly brighter, the air sweeter and the musty woodland smells more enticing than they had ever been before.

The Spider, sitting passively in his silken web, grimaced.
-There is not much to him at all, he muttered.
-All is show and no meat. Nothing to quench the hunger of the body and no sustenance for the soul. He is a flyboy pretty thing, all armour and certificates. There is no juice in this one, and no broth in his bones. He might as well be fish food for all I care.

But the Gadfly had a trumpet to blow and it was soon clear that it was his own.
-Madam, he began, -allow me to introduce myself, for I am no lowborn dung heap botfly. His eyes glittered with the sharp danger of a handful of broken glass.
-They call me the Tormenter. I am of Noble and Ancient Race. My ancestors caused dinosaurs in the rampant fern forests of aeons past to trumpet despairingly and lash their tails with brute fury against their very own flanks until they dripped red with blood.
-Me oh my, gasped the Fly. The Gadfly continued.
-I myself, as infant, stampeded horses by the herd. I have caused turf cutters to go mad and leap to their doom in bottomless bog holes. I have upturned rich picnic parties and driven even genteel ladies to tear off their undergarments in frenetic and panic stricken scratching.

By now the Gadfly had risen from his reed stalk and hovering in the air before them with the assurance of an operatic tenor delivering his seventh encore of the evening was clearly enjoying the wrapt attention of the whole Universe and perhaps other and parallel worlds far beyond that.
-I have caused proud generals on the reviewing stand to slap their own faces in the very presence of a hundred thousand disciplined soldiers under their command. Wherever I go I panic the elephant and stampede the rhinoceros and torment the crocodile until they jump through the forest like young frightened gazelles and soar into the air in their torment as do the flying fish of the far and unvisited tropics. Even the pike sheathes its razor teeth and hides its stern eye beneath the safe skin of the water when I come visiting its pool to drink!

During all this performance the Fly remained spellbound; all thought of philosophy and arachnid wisdom and witty conversation vanished from her thoughts.
-I wouldn’t mind having his maggots, she thought. –he looks mighty enough to breed a plague of locusts.

The Fly by now was so captivated by the display being enacted for her benefit that she failed to notice what was happening behind her in the silver web.
(To be continued and probably to be preceded.)


I catch up with Monday Morning


I need a hoist today to raise me from the bed. I grip the iron bedhead and heave. Cold! Cold iron! Cold tiles beneath my feet! Hard to get blood out of my fingers for the test. Stone fingers of a statue. And tired! Tired! Tired! Criss-crossing the bog all night and the moor and mountain. Like King Wenceslas. But a successful day for the painting sales. Me, drained as a well-diked field. And Rain! Rain! Rain! The washing put out two days ago to dry is washed again and again and again, drooping heavy into the lawn which I had managed to cut wet that day during an impromptu sun storm. The red sheets flap disheartened and no bull comes. Not even the donkeys, bedraggled in the barn.

I pull my dressing gown on and tap the keyboard as I pass towards the kitchen. But no broadband comes. Broadband is off. There must be water in the works or cyber pirates. Suddenly the plank wobbles beneath my feet. I am to be cut loose. The bee-buzz of voices around the world that cocoons my first awakening is abruptly silenced. There is nothing in the house now to accompany last night’s ragged dream scraps. Only shreds of distant bird song in the garden and the dripping of the universe against the bland artificiality of the running bath.

I am days behind in my blog. But I have had sales at last and I do have a new commission. Back to the studio? Write first and then paint? My driving arms ache and my eyes weep bleary from the night roads over the bogs. Better to have too much to do than too little! In the company of young men I confirm to myself I am no longer of that generation. The wheel has turned. The great boulder has moved and settled deeper into the ground. But a kind of fitness flows in me. Success is a tonic it seems. I could be thirty. A slow thirty however. But not wiser, I think.

It seems odd, without broadband. Like a death or a separation. I am surprised! It is as though a casual lover grew into a friend unexpectedly and then just as unexpectedly vanished. No note. Only an empty space. There is a startled feeling of loss. Having recorked the bottle and flushed away the rizlas and eschewed the gurus it appears I am addicted once again.

A Spit and a Handshake

But no blog for a few days. Between bailing out my attic and rowing around the potato patch looking for the start of the concrete path, and diving down to where the flower beds used to be to see if there is any truth in the pots-of-gold-and-rainbows story (my garden is overwhelmed by rainbows and now by rainbow trout as well), I have been frequently away on mercantile peregrinations.

I have crossed high ground unflooded for the moment, high bogs and valleys and the sheep grazed rhododendron forests of Erris in search of lawyers to buy my paintings. They are the only people whose heads are still above water. No contracts, for my stars warn me against legal entanglements. Just a simple promise to pay down the line is enough. Through the nose would be better but we are in the midst of recession and if I had gills I could dive down-Derry-down to the real world and see if that story is true. Since I do not have gills, not even a snorkel, I have to take a lawyer’s word for it.

No contracts, but a spit and a handshake will do. If swine flu is not a topic to bring a man out in porous nocturnal emissions (which it is) then this is a time-honoured Hibernian deal-sealer. I am happy to use it as long as it is my spit and his handshake. I am become Gombeen Man and once a name is written in my little Book of Debitors the debt will incubate snugly as a Favour Rendered to the point where soon I might consider running for Political Office myself. For larger paintings, a quick cut with a penknife in the palm of the hand can suffice but since blood swapping outside closed family groups can cause feuding or even death; I prefer gob.

As for rationing and the attendant descent into the lower circles of the 1950s, the Opposition (whoever it may be) is adamant that this retro-measure is the future if the present government (whoever it may be) continues at the helm. Helm? I hear most of the important decisions are taken in that part of the ship of state known as the head where, if not entrails then at least other steaming and recently generated fecalities are readily available for the national augurs’ ponderation so that they can make their usual coprophilic predictions. So says Schwantz anyway.

And as for spitting, though now banned in most of the civilised world apart from China, the practice in commercial scenarios is closer to us than we imagine already. When I enter posh emporiums in The Big City in my Bog Garb of caipín and Wellington Boots I already discern in the attendants Ur-frigid pronouncement ‘Can I help You Sir’ the underlocution ‘Pig-brained filth, I spit in your eye!’ Not much distance from eye to hand. (That is the shoplifter’s motto, by the way.). It is all part of the same incomprehensible paradox forced upon us by the use of language and the droolings of the left hand side of the brain. More of this later. Ad infinitum. Ad nauseam. Ad Hoc.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I have been away.

Kippah for breakfast: You’ve had your chips

The sun the sun but cold cold cold. Like a cancer scalpel righteous and without heart watching dispassionate the lighted grass, turning the lead field to gold for how long five minutes or half a day, eternity really, as emails light on me like butterflies with tales of sadness joy tragedy and hope. Sun King, how long the benign grace of thy levee until it cools? I drove my Chevy. And the boon will be reversed. My hollowness in the cold morning resounds like a drum. The tea and the toast and the rhubarb jam do nothing and the concrete path feels hard and dry and gritty under my clogs. Messages of cancers messages of loneliness. Messages of probings into the dark chambers of unseen worlds and gropings for hope. Messages of forced play with children and triste trysts with desperate strangers pass through my head rustling like white moths. But my candle is cold and hardened as old heart muscle, the wax unmelted, the wick black but unburned. Nothing engages in this kind of sunlight; neither cruelty nor compassion. No blistering flame. No far-seeing light. I am far far far from it all. The wailing wall sweeps across my horizon daubed with black suited men in ringlets and diamond dealer hats and I have a cardboard yarmulke false as the pommes-frites platter covering my pate. Overhead the distant whine of an armed mirage. I was here in Safed for flying rabbis. I found only cedars and war planes. Better the flying rabbits of the Bog.

The wet pulls back in a receding tide gone out for a while now but the cold comes in riding the sunlight like winter ice around a pond. I have stones for organs and a drum for my heart, It beats, but without comfort.

The world was fuller when it was full of water. The rain pulled back like the curtain on a stage, revealing cold light, cold eyes watching, and every move pre-planned. The beans grow now, nutritious and slow. The courgette leaves rise like dry umbrellas simulating green cumulonimbus un-nimbly rising, waiting for rain. Flicker of wax-yellow blooms, still restrained, like the still garden.

They are earthbound. And the air tickles but does not delight them with its chill. No explosion of summer. Summer fizzles like a slow fuse, but the powder is damp. September walks past in dry moccasins imparting a shiver and the smell of winter. Leaves fall and crack underfoot. I feel not tired but cruel. And words like bullets click into the chamber and are discharged dropping their empty cases with a clatter on the hard ground, evidence but not of truth.

Everything is Itself or its Opposite or a Part of a Camel

Not ready yet! Not ready yet! The tatters of a dream in gold and silvered shards collapse around me. They fall off tingling, tinkling in ghostly tintinnabulations. The outside rain drips off garden chimes and convolvulus with its own clinking sucking sound, a kind of suppressed sobbing. Last night slips to the floor in a heap of fallen bedclothes. Pools of creamed light gather around the cast off covers, silently curdling.

Outside there is sun today. A weird light flickers over the bog. Whose morning? Is it now or then? Sunflowers of light flap against the curtains and a green rustling wakefulneess begins to fill my bedroom.

Yesterday Schwantz was here. I did not light the fire. A turf fire invites intimacy and confidences. I am in two minds about Schwantz. He is a charlatan. In the Spanish sense utterly for his monologues are endless. And probably in the English sense too, for his very plausibility invites disbelief. In his roughness he is too smooth to be taken seriously. I trust the donkeys more. They have clean souls, in spite of their bad behaviour around food. At least they show what they want. Schwantz always presents himself like a crossword puzzle. He is too much of an effort to do, and full of trick questions. And in the end, what is the point anyway?

He stood first in the doorway wrapped in black oilskins dripping like a newly surfaced walrus while the gale and the wind roared behind him in the garden as if to emphasise his gross importance. I faced him in my pink dressing gown and clogs, still muddy and wet from the concrete path and my first dip into the morning oxygen, tea mug steaming.
- -You should shoot those greenfinches! he said, starting up. - Get a slug gun! Bad as magpies! Like a load of immigrants! Hang them up as a warning to the others.
I thought of all the immigrants living on the bog. Me. Him. That was about the sum of it. Enough hang-ups between us though. Perhaps we would be a good warning to others, if anyone knew. But even if they knew, would they understand? I grew courgettes the last time the sun passed this way and presented them to all my neighbours with a simple recipe. -Very nice, they said. -But I wouldn’t put them on my shopping list. I suppose there is a lot to be said for cabbage and bacon. It makes you feel as if the world does not need to spin. Like the lilies of the field.
-Tea? I offered.
He pushed into the parlour in affirmation and slumped his dripping bulk into an armchair in front of the empty grate. I would have preferred the kitchen. It is more of a place for boots and prejudice. Flags and bare wood. Better suited than a Persian Carpet. Although once, fifty years ago, on the road between Tabriz and Teheran I observed new hand woven carpets spread out in the middle of the road to age under the wheels of passing traffic. Perhaps he was doing me a favour.
- -Not a bad day after all, he said, taking a deep breath. Water pooled from his boots and trickled into the ashes around the hearthstone. I thought of the fat black leech I had discovered on the bóithrín two days before.

“Who is that black man moving
like an acquired target
in the heart of Ballyhaunis?
A noonday shadow
standing up
to make itself invisible.”

Professor Schwantz was talking.
-The problem with immigrants is that they are human beings. I have noticed that this is often a characteristic of foreigners, unless they have first been legislated against. Difference is easy to deal with. It is Sameness that causes the difficulties. Many thinking people in the past, even up until my early childhood and beyond if you count the Balkans and the Rub’ al Khali did not feel that there was any problem here at all. Difference was their currency for in a dualistic world everything is itself or its opposite or a part of a camel. This is something that can be reckoned on the fingers of half a hand holding the thumb and two fingers in reserve for other tasks and indeed it creates a powerful legal precedent. After all Duality has been around ever since the left hand side of the brain realised it had and is the upper hand. The solution to this conundrum (no pun included today) is Them and Us and makes a perfectly balanced equation: [Them never equals Us]. Us gets the directorship. Them goes to the salt mines. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.