Blog from the Bog

How Shall I Greet this Day? 1

2010-02-27T19:27:00.014Z

How Shall I Greet this Day? 1

-There are ghosts!
-Enough of your piseog-babble!
Schwantz wheezed out the words and his flabby lips gave a slight but gently cultured burp to signify that his attitude to any debate today would be reasonable and relaxed and above all well-informed. This was unlike him, but he was not yet drunk. He is a dirty fellow at heart. But I took him up on the challenge.

Even though often unhealthily pre-occupied with Attracta McCabe’s haunches, Schwantz’s conversation is generally more stimulating than that of the two donkeys, Neddy and Paddy, who live as squatters rent free in my barn. However his talk never approaches the single-minded purity of their aspiration. They are both after all holy animals and bear that cross on their backs with dogged fortitude. It is only the horrible grin when they bray that gives away their true feelings of despair. They smile then like nuns at a christening, knowing that fruitfulness will never be their lot. Schwantz’s grin is as horrible as the donkeys’ but he never gives anything away. He is as fruitful of lies as a cabbage is fruitful of caterpillars.

-You are wrong, Schwantz, I said. There is no doubt about it. I have known them personally and there is no going back on personal experience. Ghosts or spirits or gods, call them what you will. Out there, beyond the bóithrín, they rise out of the plantations like mist. I sensed them on my walk today as they fell in beside me. They are true thesaural beings, knife wielding wordsmiths with corkscrew tongues and odd vocabulary. They will help me hew a poem out of this shapeless and stony mass of language I have inherited.

From caverns measureless to man deep in the sunless sea of his unshaven face Schwantz turned his eyes upon me. In the scrap of pale sunlight my cottage window had salvaged from an unfriendly February sky his face looked brown-grey, like a winter gorse bush that has suddenly decided to tell its story before it is too late and the spring burn is upon it.

-Hew, he said, hew indeed! Are you a hewer of words, my son? Surely to say snip should be enough for an ordinary mortal. It is a pity the man would try to inflate himself to such monumental proportions, so that he is able to hew words from the base rock of language and call himself a poet. You are a legless hunchback when it comes to scribbling. Scribble away then! You scribble-scrabbler!

In front of our chairs the turf fire smoked and glowed and on the stool which served as a mini-bar a bottle flickered orange in the reflection: Wódka Żołądkowa Gorska. It was my offering to his visit now that I was home again from the icy civilisation of Poznań, where the Polish climate calls for frequent doses of this internal combustion additive, and poets, to ward off frostbite, are required by law to wear mittens when composing. I had hoped to domesticate the habit here on the Bog (I mean the habit of imbibing vodka), but on my return, discovering myself to be a little abused by gallivanting, I had visited a doctor’s surgery and found myself terrorised into abstinence at once by a beetling room of bug-eyed medics.

The fist of Schwantz closed suddenly around his shot glass and jerked it towards his mouth. I saw a brown-grey chameleon with a two foot tongue swallowing a beetle. There was a click and a slurp followed by a short glutinous cough.
-To the hewer of words, he mumbled.
-A poor sculptor lost in a quarry, and all about him ghosts, like marble statues come to life.

I was not to be put off. I went on:
-That is what I observed, Schwantz. Crossing the bog, among the frost spikes and the skeletons of orchids The cold of ice in my entrails. It reminded me of my time in Poland. I need to speak about it. And honour it properly.

Today is my Sixty-Ninth Birthday

2009-11-09T22:23:00.002Z

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

2009-11-02T21:27:00.016Z

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

2009-11-02T01:11:00.039Z

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

2009-10-31T23:35:00.002Z

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.

2009-10-31T22:53:00.005Z

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)

2009-10-31T22:07:00.009Z

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

2009-10-31T21:14:00.006Z

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

2009-10-31T20:35:00.007Z

Woman Unfinished Under Water

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

Intermission Waiting

2009-10-24T01:04:00.005+01:00

Intermission Waiting for Words

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

2009-10-21T13:49:00.003+01:00

“Is Éireannach me!”

2009-09-09T15:25:00.013+01:00

“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

2009-09-02T17:58:00.010+01:00

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

2009-09-02T00:20:00.006+01:00

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

2009-08-31T18:40:00.012+01:00

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

2009-08-25T11:30:00.003+01:00

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

2009-08-24T14:36:00.007+01:00

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.

Arrival of the Professor

2009-08-23T22:31:00.007+01:00

Rain rain rain on the window pane!
Through the computer threads streak out linking me to the wide wide world which has form for me and voice but no blood and thunder. I wonder about narrative and how to string these thoughts together into pattern and form. Is the narrative the weather day by day and this cocktail of mood and cloud and sunshine continuing and changing but always moving in one direction: my Narrative? Is it the buckled belt of the concrete path and the cloak of the bóithrín and the steel structure of memory? Or is it nothing but a vague wandering aimlessly through feelings and time and space, signifying, as the bard and many others have said, absolutely nothing?

Hard to decide in the first moments of consciousness as I am once more born and waking to another day. One more anyway! At least one more! Tea! Tea! Tea! I scatter pills into my mouth like peanuts, little tacks holding my life together. We plough the field and scatter the good seed on the land but it is fed and watered…. But then, what is the difference between the pills the doctor prescribes and the food I put into my mouth when I am eating with care and conscientiousness and with the intent of staying alive, perhaps even a bit past my allotted time. Who organises the allotment, after all?! We plough the fields….. Of course then there is the weeding!

Tea tea tea and toast. Whatever the weather I shall now slice off that small portion of the bog that is mine and place my footprints on its face and breath the outside air and walk through the Jerusalem Artichokes to my green hill not far away without a city wall but with lots and lots of stone ditches and the fanfare of hoarse horsy hosts hurrah! Now give me the tea!!

I have fed the birds again, filled the new and shiny feeder to the brim. No peanuts available at the Co-op. I get a big sack (I can hardly lift it!) of small bird seed for small birds. Half of it immediately falls through the meshes and feeds the field mouse. They were made for peanuts. At least she won’t have to climb the pole into visibility. The feral cats (for I have met them in the bóithrín lately and got their number) will be happy, should they deign to return. They are probably prowling the environs of a richer household by now. And anyway they don’t like the rain.

Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Never seems to stop. The Mayo monsoon, becoming endemic, like bog-mosquitoes. August. Holiday month. Karma for badly brought up kids. Or badly bringing up parents. It must be nice at Enniscrone today, the wind whistling through the reeds and fescue grass, the sand fixed and battened down by the downpour. No whirling into your eyes. Reek of seaweed, kelp and salt and dead crabs. Old razor shells and clams, or whatever they are, and the sandpipers marching up and down, learning to goosestep for when they go abroad. Or is this abroad? Everything is topsy-turvy these days. Nothing new. The world turned upside down again. As it always was!

Rain! Rain!. Amazed the birds put up with it. But they are out there quarrelling as usual, now they have something to quarrel about. I hate the greenfinches with their hooked beaks and avaricious eyes. They are a good proof for where Tyrannosaurus Rex went when he was offered the witness protection programme after fingering the Space Invaders. Brute force when they can’t get their own way. Where do they come from? They go back sometimes. Not for long enough. Take what they can and go and come back for more. Carpetbaggers. I favour the home bred: robin and the wren, in spite of its short fuse, and the dunnock. No trouble. Almost pets. And Mister Peepsie the chaffinch. Knows enough to ask for his breakfast. Can’t call it singing for his supper. More like an annoyed glottal tick. He has a growth like a reed blossom on his leg. Like his father. Runs in the family. His grandfather learned to bump the kitchen window and get seeds on the sill. Gave him an advantage over the others. How long do they live? Someone told me three years. Their day must be pretty intense then. Lots of immigrants here. Not real asylum seekers. They go and come. Earn here, take it all home to wherever, Africa, who knows, and come back for more. No regulations.

Rain! Rain! Rain!. Hard now. Like lead shot. The deck round the studio filling up like a grey lake. I’d better put newspapers down inside. The Bog wants to wipe everything out. Smooth it down and turn it into turf and grow over it nice and neat. Turn us all into bog mummies. Then we can be dug up in a thousand years and put in a state-sponsored museum and called heritage. Make money for somebody.

Rap at the door. Louder than the rain. Using the brass harp door-knocker. Brassy and peremptory. Un-Irish. Do I want company. YesNoYesNo Who is it? I hide behind the door frame and peer through the bathroom glass.

It’s Schwantz. Professor Schwantz. Schwantz the Professor. Not from here. Not from Curryaun certainly. Not from Ireland. Another continental blow-in that stuck to the Mayo cloth like a burr and hasn’t the will to pull himself loose and get a real life in a real place. A gabber. A real gab-man. A gab-gubbe. Never stops talking. I wonder about letting him in. Once he opens his mouth he never stops. He stops but his mouth doesn’t. Loose-hinged. All flaps open. All stops out. Machine gun palatals. Motorised labials. Epiglottis can’t keep still. Glottolalia. E' glottolalia magistralis (dicesi glottolalia lo stato in cui il santo o il mistico prestano il proprio apparato vocale alla divinità che parla per bocca .... Glossolalia maybe. Glossodoolalia. I do not think he talks in tongues, only in the tongue of Saint Schwantz himself. No need for a connection with God, for he is Him. Still I appreciate the gallon of poitín he brought me a couple of years ago. Or I would if I dared to drink it. I took a small sip once. The next day I was down with a hallucinatory kidney infection. It might have been a coincidence, of course. If one is spiritually impoverished enough to believe in coincidences, that is. I may well be of that category, but I prefer not to take chances, at this tender extremity of life. I serve it to visiting foreigners at the studio only and they feel well-Irished.

Well, I suppose I need a break.

Schwantz the Professor. Professor Schwantz. Don’t know Professor of What? Punch and Judy most likely. European sort. University of Gothenburg he says. But he can’t speak Swedish, for I tried him. Says it was a long while ago and I did not press the point. I said it was a quotation from Hafez, merely, and in the original Farsi, and that I was simply summing up the futility of living in memory and the draughty halls of the past, and who cares about Gothenburg now anyway, whatever it might have meant to us both at the time, which in my case was not much. He agreed. Or at least he let it pass without further elaboration.

Everything is a long while ago now. Stinking old-age. Age, age where is thy stink, death where is thy what? Or was it the grave?
Anyway, he blew in there too from somewhere faraway else, who knows what place? Sort of Central European I would guess from the rich cultural baggage he carries about with him and shares lavishly. Too rich for the bog, but I am thankful for small mercies. He is after all a real person and could never be confused with a computer monitor. A monitor lizard, perhaps.

Reckons he knew me from then. Might have. I don’t remember those years. Pripps Number Three.

Parallelograms

2009-08-21T13:14:00.014+01:00

That was a cold cold cold morning, that day. Tractors passed early: green for Michael, orange for Sam, blue for Tom D, each with its own throaty cough. So cold the hands of autumn under my dressing gown. I had left my big coat in the car ready for the viewing and the walk to the church. Rain was predicted. And the eternal wind.
I must air my fusty funeral suit with the button up waistcoat and go out and blow the cobwebs from my head along the concrete path. I shall follow the path into security. Perhaps I should extend it? All the way up the meadow, maybe to the hawthorn enclosure. Perhaps even beyond those magic protectors. Over the bóithrín. Out across the commonage. Up past Martin’s pines and their dark pine martins’ lairs. Over the bog and away from the misty holes where the bogmen fester out the centuries. Even further out, far and away to hot and hotter places. Keep it going. Into the broiling Chaco, land of wild pigs and serpents. Through the sizzling streets of Concepción littered with old tanks and steam trains. Down Asunción’s cobbled lanes shaded with pink and blue lapacha, strange giants whose seeds resemble castanets and whose husks crack like rifle shots on the hottest days. Or even further. To the terra incognita of my unexamined youth. My own no-man’s-land. I can speak the lingo now.

June 1st 1966
At the Bottom of the Garden, Calle San José 32, Calella, Spain.

I ought to call this an interim report; it is so long since I wrote anything. Time goes quickly here. During the month I have kept up my routine, practicing two hours every morning at the bottom of the garden and then normally an hour or so in my room in the evening by candlelight with Vera lying in bed reading or listening. The garden is ideal for practicing, with its high walls that shut out the world. I’m screened from the house by a thick flowering shrub all covered with pink blooms, and by the tangerine tree. I hadn’t seen a tangerine tree before. They are very closely branched. It makes a good screen. I sit in a kind of summerhouse. The end of the garden, which is paved except for the flowerbeds, is roofed over, high, like a kind of stable. The overflow from the water tanks runs out in a terracotta fountain with cherubs and moss. There’s a large pond-like tank under it where they keep the milk and the cakes, full of bug-infested water. It’s very secure and isolated, except when Mr or Mrs B comes down to collect a bottle, or leave one in the tank. I’ve learned a lot of songs: the whole of the Clancy Brothers songbook.
It’s raining now, after lunch. The thrushes are noisy and radios are playing in the house next door and someone is hammering. They are always building here. There was thunder a while ago. Now just the soft rain pattering on the leaves. Clouds of swallows above the house.

That was a faraway place, off there, forty and more years ago, at Bobby’s Bar on Franco’s Costa Brava between Barcelona and the bare and tragic hills that overlooked the ocean. The valleys were full of paths and the paths full of dust, untrodden, like old abandoned houses. The trees stood always motionless as old people at a funeral. They moved me often enough as I walked through the scattered ruins they observed, never knowing why I felt so sad or what might once have happened there.

So very far away, on the sharp edge of youth, with childish things put behind me by default and the rest of life like a dark impenetrable thicket barring my path. It is clear now that I had defaulted somewhere along the way and had not picked up all the essential equipment I was to need to finish my journey in a satisfactory manner. Unless, that is, it was the journey that mattered, and not even the Devil cared where I ended up afterwards.
I learned my first trade there, practicing my guitar by the terracotta fountain under the tangerine tree and beside what turned out, when it burst one day into amazing Martian Invader Technicolor bloom, to be a pomegranate bush, cruel, thorned and beautiful.

This was a place I had no need to know again, although the memories linger like Saturday night perfume during Sunday morning prayers. I retained for later use the pomegranate bush’s safe isolation of being, penetrated only by a consciousness of lizards and locusts and the meaningless poetry of rain.

This morning Pam came in with an uneven drizzle of tears and told us that Audrey whom I’d met a couple of times had been killed this morning. It was on the road from Pineda. She and a lorry, the car demolished. I remember what they said about her. Suicidal, whatever that really means. She talked and thought and painted and was lousing up her life. I am not touched. I did not really know her. I do not know yet what lousing up a life means. And death is just a word. I have never seen a corpse or even loved anyone who became one. I’ve never even loved anyone. I don’t know what people mean when they talk about their feelings. The sound of the rain is nice. And I am alone, also nice. Lunch was good: stew with beef and kidneys in it, and strawberries after. Vera is kind today. I’m shirking painting the new bar. So I’m quite content. Listening to the rain.

I stand by the open coffin with the bitter-sweet taste of tea and toast and rhubarb jam in my mouth. I noticed mould in the jam jar this morning. I had to scrape it off. It is a shock to see you now, old neighbour! You are shrunk to nothing shrouded in silk ruffs and painted like a little doll; a model man made of marzipan in a confectioner’s shop window. You are not here. You are gone. A line of sombre lads, the immaculate males of the family, salute your journey with a volley of handshakes but you have already gone. The people say you were a model man. Older women grey-haired in black dresses with silver brooches mourn you in a sad line. Younger women sit and I am sorry for their trouble again and again and again as I review the family. It is a quick business. I am soon out in the sunshine and the rain.

Now the rain is much harder and the ground has begun to smell earthy and wet. The butcher’s fridge next door is humming away. I suppose I can hear the sea somewhere in the background, apart from the thunder, but it’s difficult to tell, there are so many other sounds; all distant behind the rain; indefinite places, but distant.

Calella is utterly boring and only practice, reading and long walks with Vera up into the hills make things bearable. I cannot converse with the B’s. We live in different realities. Perhaps mine is an illusion, though it seems true enough to me. Martin is very funny. The parents squabble and quarrel at night in the room next door. The bar isn’t yet open so I have no work and am kept but not paid. I haven’t sung since The Gloucester in South Kensington. The tour guides who frequent the house do not help to liven things up much. Everyone sits around talking about food mainly or lawyers. I act the buffoon usually which is the only way I can place myself comfortably. Otherwise I might just as well not be in the room. Nobody talks about REAL things. There is no common ground when we are assembled. Conversation is about food and diseases. I am still without a point of view that I can write down. Mainly I am me, just shut away, and that is that. And the rain falls with such a pleasant sound and the leaves are very, very green this afternoon.

We went out last night. There was a power failure and we sat around in candlelight eating fried eggs. Then Martin wanted to go out for a coffee. I don’t like these bars and coffee joints. The peasants, German and Spanish, laugh and point at my beard. Some hysterical woman pulled it a few nights ago. I settled with Mathew for him to buy us strawberries and cream. Then we went and borrowed 40 pesetas from Martin and went to Kiki’s bar and met Bob and borrowed 100 pesetas. Got a little bit drunk and touchy and quarrelled with Vera and went home and quarrelled some more and went to sleep and woke up and made it up. She is nice to me today. So be it, this day of rain and death and caring very much about everything somewhere deep down underneath and lost.

The garden has two kinds of lizards and now and then a great three inch grasshopper.

A Late Death

2009-08-17T23:22:00.003+01:00

I have heard of your late death. Let me think about it. This is not news to be entertained quickly. Too near the knuckle. Too far from the cold head. There will be a removal soon and a burial hard on it. I will come to them when you do.

I shall walk the long maze now and take my afternoon constitutional along the magic bóithrín where I have walked for seven years. I shall meditate, mostly on myself, for Death makes Siamese Twins of everyone. This maze is a place of ivy and rowan and other plants that transgress the fixed boundaries of logic, flowering here with enchantment but rooting on the other side, channels of draíocht and sorcery. Once there were oaks here. Those sacred groves were cut down long ago and sent in chains to hold up the roofs of foreign churches. It is said that our ancestors belonged to both sides.

After the news reached me the weather took a strange course and in a flash the cold drizzle changed to hot sunlight and all around me yellow flowers burst out golden and hopeful. The fallacy is a pathetic one I know but I cannot help believing in it. The air here now smells sweet and of blackberries. The wind sings in the telegraph wires and has stopped its miserable keening. The sun bounces back from the road, hot on ankles, hot on hands, quite amiable.

It is seven years today since I arrived and found the last four-leafed clover in a fifty year chain of finds growing here between the wheel tracks. I have never found one since. Perhaps the last one marked a journey completed. Over these years every cell in my old body has been exchanged for a new green one. Here I am older but in a brand-new body walking the same bóithrín. In another seven years I shall be the same age as you were yesterday, my late neighbour. The year is shrinking. The hawthorn berries are already reddening. They look like the bowls of small polished briar pipes set among thorns. Summer slides in imperceptible slippage towards the fall, and the year is smouldering away.

A large brown dragonfly stops before me treading air. Does it know I’m here? The Ryan jet, the one with the everlasting prow, passes overhead. Heaven's trumpets resound in the blue air. It is a vast blue canopy now, not just enough to make a sailor a pair of trousers! It has become suddenly big enough to be a complete sail; enough to pull the whole island off to somewhere else far away over the ocean.

Out of the ruined houses nettles leap barking like wolves, defensive and territorial, full of contained aggression. The ash trees sigh and whisper quietly; new-comers they, a green roof rising from the roofless parlour. People lived here and left the year I was born. They took their livestock and their roof with them. The ash trees are too young to remember. They know nothing of Death yet. They could ask the fuchsias. They know.

The Concrete Path: Death and Convalescence

2009-08-16T00:45:00.008+01:00

This morning my neighbour died but I do not know this yet. It is a cold bleak drizzly day with a miserable wind complaining out of the north-east. I had slept like a piece of lead piping dropped down a well and am compos mentis again it seems and convalesced enough to work at something or other, although it does not seem important what. I take this indifference as a warning but ignore it anyway. Two friends text me and tell me their cancer operations are done. I shiver. It looks cold out there in the garden. I put on a heavy leather Liverpool pea jacket over my dressing gown and grope for the concrete path, holding my tea mug to my cheek like a plague posy. The shame of my hypochondria accompanies me in reproachful silence through the back door.

But now the concrete path takes over and leads me with the firm guidance of an in-house nurse who is well-used to incontinent nincompoops and dodderers. We walk together between bedraggled tiger lilies reduced to toothless cats by the night wind and here and there step over the collapsed wreckage of green hollyhock towers. The wind tries to get inside my coat like a homeless ocelot, pleading and threatening by turns. I pull leather around me, feeling the crust of yesterday’s influenza in my eyes, still in my sinuses today, prickly, and myself prickly too and irritable with the vile morning and the vile weather. I let the wind slide by me like a beggar, ignored. I refuse to meet the eyes of poverty. Let the poor blow off somewhere else to make bad weather and beg for love and sunshine.

How is it that June was flaming Mediterranean but that for all the rest of the past two years I have been expecting Noah to come trundling over the horizon with his ark on a donkey cart looking for the inland sea of Erin as his starting point for a biblical regatta? Even the Bog Lakes on top are sprouting mermaids!

My courgettes are scarcely able to slide themselves out of the flower’s womb before they begin to rot. Only grass and lettuce thrive as a breakfast for Beast and Man. I shall be a Beast Man if I sink any deeper into this bog.

What would it be like to live where, instead of the cow with the crumpled horn that now stares me down over the ivy ditch like an angry hag, it was strong black garbed women carrying wicker baskets of fresh loaves across a sunlit square that greeted my eyes in the morning, and the smell of coffee and peaches and jasmine on old old walls. And instead of the basilisk glare of the donkeys braying for attention I could be greeted by the sound of bells from a Catalan basilica or a stolen Moorish palace ringing across my breakfast table, as I drank sweet Arab coffee and dunked my croissant, studying the architecture of passing women and beautiful buildings, as I once did 40 years ago but now with the leisurely appreciation of experience and not the panting hunger of youth.

You read this blog and comment from far away places, warm places, places where the stones are worked with artifice into cathedrals and living tombs and great statues and delicate carvings and majestic paved squares where well-heeled crowds surge back and forth to the wine dark tide-pull of a fermenting civilisation. You comment about my green wet land of pre-history. Well, it remains pre-history still for nothing moves here but cattle and the stealthy land raids of herdsmen plotting in their outhouses how to filch with the speed of a slug another inch of bogland from their neighbours. And the stealthily abrasive grindstone of the weather and inherited memory glaciate the landscape down to uneventful grass and bog and farmer’s gossip. In the end handfuls of sand. But each grain cunningly etched of course.

You would like to come here? From the snail-decked land of Gaudi and the pillared Toledo halls and the Alhambra echoing with the wisdom of long-banished philosophers, and thinkers beaten to death by the heavy crucifix and burned, and scent of orange blossom and jasmine and olive, and all things moving and alive, and terrible and delightful, your hot-blood paradox, land of Goya, land of Velasquez, land of Franco and the Inquisition, Torquemada and oranges. The swallows visit you there. Why do they return to scrag and reed beds and a mouthful of midges? This is not an inspiring morning. Where on the bog this morning is the rosy warmth of global warming? The hot breath of a dawn that replaces bog orchid with amaryllis and finger sized tulips and shakes the bog flats into a counterpane of embroidered floral fantasy? You want to come to Sligo?

The concrete path takes me on past the collapse of summer to the potato patch. They wave their yellow and green and black flags at me and wink their pretty pratified petals, jumping around in the wind like football supporters, some black-faced and vomiting, some aren’t-you- the- muscley-A-Alpha-male, some supremely and quietly proud and silent ! Big unblighted roosters! What will happen if I do not harvest them? Will they tuck themselves up and wait till next year and rise again, hale and hearty, or come creeping in stinking of scab and the old disease, the bog-family inheritance? Does the hand of God reach out to the immigrant failure with even handed compassion? Or should Walter have left them to the Indians in the New World?

The concrete path rocks slightly beneath my feet on its uncertain future. In the Stolen Field the cow with the crumpled horn notices the sudden clamour my passing produces in her world, and approaches the ditch for a hobnob. She has waited long. Is this what she was waiting for? A Messiah has come? Her head over the wall, her huge bulk rises like a whale from the ocean of sour weeds that is her world enclosure.

She fixes me with her eye, large, cold, disappointed, enquiring, like a jaundiced judge too long on the bench. I speak to her, but there is no need for words. Beside the cattle crush her calf waits like an auctioneer, curious, already the small man, bullish and perfect, tall as the old grass. They belong to the Stolen World. I am on a different side of the ditch.

Rain beats suddenly across my face, like a duellers slap. The donkeys, back by the house, have seen me. They bray bread and the bog arena echoes mournfully with their castrated sadness like a Jumbo Jet full of pilgrims landing for Knock Shrine.

I turn. Goodbye cow, somebody else’s. Goodbye Stolen Field. Somebody else’s. Goodbye the sun drenched squares of Spain and the ambulatory shapes of Spanish women. Somebody else’s. The concrete path mutters comfortingly. Don’t worry. Come along. We know where to go. Breakfast. Porridge. Grey like me and the Curryaun skies. Yum! This morning my neighbour died. But I do not know this yet.

The Maze: Convalescence

2009-08-14T23:13:00.006+01:00

...and other mazes.

A blackbird overreacts and a red brown wren of microscopic proportion and astronomical fury breaks screaming towards the forestry which swallows it in a gulp and continues to observe me with the indifference of a two-by-four. I surmise the forest is practicing for its final examination. I am alone. I was alone before and now I am alone again. Also I am beyont. I should explain. Beyont is that place where nothing is done which cannot be done one-handed and thinking of something else. It is the place for writing and painting and on a good day the spot where in secret and shady nooks poetry might unexpectedly be found, as are found, in the real world, wild and edible mushrooms. Some say it is a good place to convalesce and for that I am here.

Beyont and the everyday world do not mix. The everyday world requires for the safety and success of its operation enormous amounts of thought logical. As you might imagine thought logical hurts, and particularly hurts the head, for it drags this poor organ by main force from its rooted and natural habitat, which is the state of beyont, and into the bland world of practicality. I have today risen from my fever bed. My head wishes not to be hurt for a while.

On either side of me the dead grass like golden telegraph poles has fallen under the rain, and wild angelica rises through it umbelliferous and strung with coins. Umbels of buachalán too provide a proscenium for butterflies and bees and today strange wanna-bees in wasp disguise have come to suck and strut their stuff. A white butterfly trimmed with black fur is sipping nectar from a knapweed crown, so got up you’d think she had dropped into the wrong neighbourhood. Like a stray thought, blown far from point of origin, she drinks one-handed.

At this moment I am in a maze, mindless and mapless, and have no need whatsoever to think of anything, let alone the sharp possibilities offered by the needles of compass points or directions or the meaning of life. I do not even have to follow the sun, if there were ever one here.

For now there are three mazes that chart and preserve my present daily movements. These three allow me to commute mindlessly and unthinking from one place to another and back again every day which is a considerable and cumulative saving in energy.

Firstly there is the night maze, the carpet path that winds about among cottage obstacles during the hours of darkness and creeps through unseen doors opening them easily under my somnambulatory fingering at 2am and at 4 am and at 6am. This path with the utter certainty of a 500 year old Tudor maze leads me from my bed to the bathroom and back again without the need to absent myself from the sweet beyont of dreamland or to grope for an empty bottle.

Secondly there is my self-constructed concrete path decorated with intaglio impressions of blossoms in season to prevent slipper slippage which leads me every morning before breakfast as securely as the hand of the Creator out from my back door through the visible universe of flower and vegetable beds and improbable encounters with other strayed sheep to its distant termination at the compost heap. Then having allowed me to meditate on the inevitable future of all those born of woman it guides me back with value-added gloom and despair to where I came from in the first place and the rich consolation of a mess of pottage.

And then thirdly there is the afternoon maze, the bóithrín. Which is where I am now and to which I shall return anon.

Down into the Bas Court where Kings grow Base

2009-08-12T19:30:00.007+01:00

Under the Magnolia

“It was, as always, under the Magnolia Tree.
At first there were the usual clichés:
the staccato thud of Kalashnikov rosebuds
as she stitched him up,
and, for no extra consideration,
a free crown of thorns.
“Hide them in your jockey shorts,” she said.
“No one will know, and the discomfort
will force you to remember!”

“No,” he thought, “No, I shall go down.
I shall go down now.
I shall go down now and I shall fall, fall forever.

I shall fall like red wine
into the green and whistling serpent grass.
I shall fall like blue silent thunder,
mute with un-realization.

I shall bleed back into the red earth
like an unwritten song.
I shall lie there, scarlet at first, and then crimson,
and then black and hard
in the green and whistling serpent grass.”

But then, although the green grass
throated its full funereal chorus
and chirruped till the cows came home,
surprisingly,
there was no movement on the part of the ground.
This time the earth did not move.
This time the ruddy, bloodied soil
did not rise to receive him.
There was no enfoldment.
He remained unclaimed,
like a discarded cigarette package, rather.
And so, I suppose, after a while
The bleeding stopped.

June arrived, you see.
June arrived with pre-meditation,
and stepped on his face.
That’s what happened.
It must have taken the nimble pace of a conjurer
to skip across the garden like that,
and in a trice change the colours
of the flowers.

And indeed he did fail to see how she did it.
For where the sun shone through her luminous stride,
Vanishing the thin summer dress into a spider’s web of gossamer,
he was now struggling to glimpse the outline of her thighs
and the shadowed mysteries that accompanied them
through the wafer thin material of the dream,
with only moderate success”.

Back View

2009-08-11T09:47:00.006+01:00

My childhood is full of muted voices asking me in pained tones the whereabouts of vanished property. Once upon a time these voices complained stridently but my memory is carefully selective. It has softened the sound and turned if not a blind eye then at least a deaf ear in the direction of the past.
I recollect the voices as whispers, indistinct, almost not there at all. I do not remember screams or even the harsh baying of an angry posse come to retrieve some stolen article. That is all squeezed down among the dead men. I cannot remember the voices. The goods on the other hand I see clearly before me in minute and cherished detail.
Among them was a wooden gun, a pistol, a kind of small imitation Luger, painted grey and black, with a tin finger guard and a nail for a trigger. I suspect it had had an owner and I am sure that I could have identified him had I wished. I was certainly not that person, for I kept the toy jealously hidden in a nook in the ivy of the stone wall that separated Cove Cottage from the property next door and never showed it to anyone.
I would take the pistol out from its hiding place among the leaves and finger it cautiously and sight it on imaginary targets in the garden. Miss Maggs, Winston Churchill, German pilots all raised their hands at my command or bit the dust. This was not an activity I risked when I had company or might have been observed. That alone leads me to suspect that I did not have firm and legitimate title to the weapon.
I do have a vague memory of a previous owner, an older boy. The memory is shadowy. He is almost a ghost figure, hovering about me, entrusting me with the weapon, and disappearing.
He never surfaced again.
Perhaps it was the start of the summer season and we had to leave on our annual housing peregrinations before he returned to claim his gun.
I think that might have been what happened, for among other half forgotten memories I see myself returning after a long absence and joyfully retrieving my pistol once more from among the ivy berries.
But there is some confusion.
During these years dream and fact and history were all mixed up together and it is hard to determine what happened when, and how and why. It was a story that would not sit still for the camera.
I vaguely call to mind a transaction with treasonable undertones. There are echoes of Excalibur and a whiff of Faust. Is it possible I had swapped one of the beautifully crafted and decorated model aircraft my father brought home for me as a present from the RAF and received this crude and fascinating weapon in exchange?
I do know that the gun was particularly dear to me.
My father’s aeroplanes, on the other hand, seemed to invite destruction. They never lasted very long. They went missing in action during their first weeks.
There is also a half-memory of my mother asking me where the gun had come from. There was the unspoken accusation that I had stolen it from somebody else. The real facts, whatever they were, are lost in time. If a crime had been committed, whether of theft or of betrayal, I have airbrushed it from my memory. I recollect only that the pistol somehow seemed to be tarred with guilt. Early in its life it became quite necessary to keep it hidden.
Sometimes when I went to play with it I did not even take it out of its hiding place in the ivy. The ripe ivy berries that hung there looked wonderfully like large lead shot. I picked them and used them as bullets, rolling them around in my palm and hurling them at enemies in the shrubbery. Most of my games with the gun were in my imagination, but its very presence hidden behind the leathery green leaves filled me with power.

One day I went out to be close to my gun and when I arrived at the wall something in the long grass beside the garden shed caught my eye.
I paused and looked down.
There was a clearing where the grass stems had bent over under their own weight and there curled up in a patch of sunlight I met my first snake.
All thought of pistol play now vanished from my mind.
No armament could compare with this creature.
I knew its reputation from afar. It was power and it was mystery. If the wind carried gods through the garden and the clouds whispered their immanence, this snake was much more. It was incarnate and a god in its own right.
It had stepped out of the story books and the Bible and myth and here it was, waiting for me, curled up in my grass, beside my ivy, guarding my pistol. This was no imaginary dragon. It was flesh.
I did not call my mother. I knew this was uniquely my moment. I would savour it alone.

The snake was a small one, grey-brown and smooth.
It was hard to tell which end was which.
I could make out neither eye nor mouth. It seemed more the generic, undifferentiated idea of a snake, a hieroglyph rather than an actual living animal.
I crouched down perfectly still and watched.
The snake lay coiled in the grass drinking sunshine through its skin. It looked like a sleeping spring, wound up but infinitely relaxed. Tiny scale patterns shone along its flank as in a finely woven fabric. Its back shimmered. It was a silk stocking that breathed.
I did not touch.
In the silence and the stillness I took possession of it in the name of the garden.
I remained looking at my snake for a long time.
Then I tiptoed away.
I heard my feet self-consciously reach the gravel path and a breeze blew along the garden wall. There was a rustling and the ivy on the wall began to undulate, wavelike, as though something sinuous and large moved beneath the leathern, scaly leaves.
I understood. There was no need for words.

Flu Blog: Fever the Two

2009-08-09T21:31:00.006+01:00

I swim sweetly sweatily sweat-swaddled into the dripping past. What is this imbalance, hot and wet, hot and sweat, steamily unpleasant around me? The flu is it, or a twenty year vintage malaria bottled up inside like bad Paraguayan wine? I feel unpropitiated and unpropitiated bugs from an unguarded past teem in my wings. I waded the potato patch yesterday looking for signs of disease. The signs are manifest now. The disease is here. Was I blighted by a leppercorn? I am bitten! Something has bit me! Is it the new pills or the flat exhaustion that comes from living as if I am 30 years of age, crisscrossing this land again and again like a roadie on speed? I just awoke from a nightmare. Or did I wake into one? I am a small island runnelled with lava flows, steaming beside a sunless sea. I wake. I do not recognise the room. My paintings scream and leer from the walls. It was a bad move to hang them! With glee they start their haunting, subconscious effusions released into malicious form. I should have left them beyont in the deep dark place. I stand like a wraith, feeling for the door, my foot in the cooking pan, the ready vomitorium. The night is not over.

“You may laugh at the way a worm walks.
It may seem scarcely more than an oozement.
But the sensitive worm, when he's out for a squirm,
will not share in your churlish amusement.

Don't forget, the worm always laughs last,
and he'll laugh very loud when you're dead-oh!
and he'll spread you for miles
in those little brown piles
that are like Walnut-Whips in the meadow!
Worms, worms, dying to meet you!
Worms, worms, waiting to eat you!
Worms!”

Flu Blog: Fever the One

2009-08-09T10:38:00.011+01:00

Down since Friday night. Down deep and dirty and distressed. Down among the deadmen. Swine Flu at least. Swine Flu at last. After weeks of their predictive text and schadenfreudige malice the Yellow Press and the Talking Skulls have convinced me. I am, no doubt about it and totally gan amhras, a goner a goner a goner. So I am. Soon my bones and still palpitating heart will lie and fester deep beneath the soggy bogland turf shadowed by willow herb and yellow gorse, mummifying gently to the dun consistency of a soda bread crust. I shall metamorphosize. I hear the siren song of Kafka calling me through fever and nightmare to a far worse place than this. I shall become the Bog Man of Curryaun. It is the Man Flu I have! It is surely the Bog Man Flu!

Flashback: The Nuisance Factor

Humans were too hard to approach. They were like monkey trees. Too prickly to hug, let alone climb on. He searched for gods. They were supposed to understand. But they were prone to disease. There was a dead leaf, rimed with frost, lying on the earth like a diamond brooch. He reached to pick it up. It crumbled coldly between his fingers. It had been stuck to the ground. Like the old trick with a penny glued to the pavement. He walked on, coldness in his chest, disappointed.
That winter sickness returned.

He had been calling out for a long time.
Eventually she gave in and fetched the wireless. He listened from deep within his bed to the grudging footsteps labouring up the stairs.” You are such a nuisance! Such a nuisance.” She made room among the books and medicine bottles. The sun shone very brightly outside. It cauterized the wound. It was blue hot, like an acetylene torch across the sky. He wondered if the trees would burst into flame. She does not believe in my sickness. I am in the way. Even up here in bed, out of the way, I am in the way. He did not voice the words. They formed internally, each like a dark crystal laid down to age. The wooden stairs groaned again under his mother’s displeasure. They fell silent. She was gone. Only her reproach remained. He waited. He watched a sharp beam of sunlight inch like a scalpel across the bare boards from the window. It cut into the chair by the bed and rose towards him. Only when it reached the wireless did he stretch out his arm and switch on the programme.

He was ill until the spring. When the snow was all gone and the Maple sap started rising they said he was well. When the summer came he was allowed out into the sunshine again.

Sometimes it was hard to bear, the sweet smoothness of the sunshine. He sat back on the grass and the stream gurgled and splashed among the bulrush stems and flexed its green muscley arms over the reeds. There were four frogs linked together with white string and tied loosely to one of the stems. They had given up trying to escape. They had been there for three days. They sat on the cress beds and waited dully like prisoners in the death cell. He was the slave master now. He wondered if he should kill them or let them go. He listened to the peaceful flow of the water. After a while he dozed off. He awoke to a sharp blow in his side and pain and another blow and more pain. “You disgusting little brat!” He was being kicked and slapped by three big girls in hiking boots. Another boot winded him. He scrambled up. They were too big to fight. He couldn’t even have reached their hair. He spat defiantly over the nearest sweater with all the brown snotgob he could dredge from his sinuses and ran off across the meadow planning revenge.

“Do not bring snakes home again!” He had never seen his father angry like this before. It was a revelation. Was it fear? The axe rose and fell three times. The blade sank deep into the turf of the lawn with a chunk chunk chunk. The snake wriggled away in three directions at once like the Holy Trinity disguised as an earth worm. “You could have been bitten! That’s a water moccasin! They are extremely dangerous!” He did not think it was a water moccasin. Did they even have them in Quebec? He didn’t think so. It was just a grass snake with big teeth. It wasn’t even aggressive. It had been easy to catch. He’d stood on it and put his noose around its neck and lifted it up on a stick like a fish on a fishing rod. It had lived in a shoe box. It hadn’t seemed to mind, after objecting a little at the start. It slept most of the time. It didn’t do enough to make an interesting captive. He had even thought of letting it go. That was the Royal prerogative. He’d only brought it home to frighten his sister. Now it was too late. He put the pieces on a shovel and took them to the orchard to bury. He should have known better than to bring it into the house. It belonged in his world, not theirs. His father was a pastor. He did not understand cruelty.

“Worms are female and male all at once.
Hermaphrodite is the scientific term.
You can tell that I'm right
By their bath-towels at night:
One says Him and the other says Herm.
Thus though a Worm may seem ugly and shunned
By the Ladies, he don’t seem to mind.
When he’s left on the shelf he makes love to himself.
I might add, though, that most worms are blind.
Worms! Worms! Dying to meet you!
Worms! Worms! Waiting to eat you!
Worms!”

Flu again

2009-08-09T02:56:00.001+01:00

Struggling with what I hope is only flu. So another delay with the blog.

Roots and the Anaconda

2009-08-07T15:35:00.005+01:00

"Annie had an anaconda,
An anaconda,
An anaconda.
Annie had an anaconda.
It slept on the mat.
In came the cat, all big and fat:
Squish! Squash!
I somehow don’t need to go on with this painful family history, do I?
We are talking about actual life in all its cruel and delightful simplicity".

Back on my bog after two weeks of other people’s highways. The traveller’s moon has mocked me at night, mentioning my awful ancestors vindictively under her breath, as if I were the one responsible for them, clearly putting the cart before the horse and the ass before the donkey. I have been to the sun-blown fields of Pembrokeshire and the fly-blown domiciles of close relatives in search of both truth and booty. I have criss-crossed, the clock says interminably, the rain spattered rock studded baronies of County Clare and viewed without overweening begrudgement those Big Houses and Impregnable Castles recently called home by my matriarchal forebears. It occurs to me that they were as pregnable in the end as that ingenuous Virgin of the House, my unfortunate Grandmother, but thank Heaven for small mercies! Without the bar sinister there would have been no Me, nor the whole ark of related progeny that in the hundred years since that matrimonial miscalculation now reaches out happy tentacles to encircle the entire globe, or at least a large and semi-civilised portion of it. (To be continued after tea).

My Lawn on the Bog

2009-07-24T22:57:00.009+01:00

(Notes of a Professional Hypochondriac. Tagebuch eines professionellen Hypochonders)

Decked out in deck chair and straw hat I lounge on my homemade lawn today completely in tune with the Zeitgeist of the wider Bog, musing on the approach of fatal and incurable diseases. The sun galloped out of the East this morning riding fast on the back of a black windstorm as if running away from something nasty nasty nasty. It has hung around cancerously overhead ever since clearly contemplating a counter-atrocity. I have tied my hat to my head and tethered my chair to a passing erratic well lodged in the earth and am now covered for sun, wind, rain, storm or an attack by flying turtles, rare, but not impossible I have been told.

My lawn was torn out of some sad abandoned tract of bogland whose turf bearing days are not even a distant memory, so barren had its rooty furrows become. It was a forlorn ground, earthless, turfless, stonyfaced as an unwilling bachelor long past his useful reclamation date. Out of kindness I turned the ground out to grass. And with constant feeding, gleaned garden weeds and recycled scutch grass, and with the benediction of the interminable rains-without-end that protect all bog dwellers from the abomination of the sun it has turned into a well watered and lush pasture that now needs two donkeys to cut it and when they are beyont, grows overnight rattling exponentially upwards like a beanstalk until it looks in the morning as if it could feed five cows until they burst like fireworks in the sky. And there would still be enough grass left over for twenty-five good bales of silage to swap for potatoes.
(Next week I shall tell you more.)

Zephyrs and the Black Bog Midgets

2009-07-23T12:16:00.006+01:00

“Underneath the Spreading Cemetery
All the little Worms are full of glee.
They wait for you and they wait for me!
Underneath the Spreading Cemetery.

Always keep on good terms with Worms!
Always keep on good terms with Worms!
Always smile, be good mannered and be best behaviour-ed,
Or one night in a grave in some dark lonesome graveyard
You may meet them again and you won't feel so brave you'd
Best keep on good terms with Worms! Worms!
Dying to meet you!
Worms! worms! Waiting to eat you!

Worms!”

A visit to the alchemist and the tide of fever recedes with a slurp leaving me wrinkled and happy as an untrodden beach. Muchibus Thankibus a dhochtúir! What a pick-me-up is belief! It picks me up yes yes yes and then blows me about the garden like a peppercorn with wings. The old changeable bogweather transmutes; skies of lead to skies of gold. I am carried into happiness by unclad gusts and placed gently among the lilies. Lilies! Graveyard flowers! I mock them! I own the pathetic fallacy. I own the weather. Like a lover blinded the wind breathes for me only. For who else? I alone. Even the donkeys have gone beyont.

With the delicious heat come delicious breezes, gentle as mist, stroking and carding and cleaning the garden. Kindness to me and a sweet flicking brutality to the midges that forces them back into the undergrowth. They begrudge us from there, waiting, always, impatient, like heirs at a deathbed. In the black undergrowth poison midgets are brewing bootleg among the nettles, testing needles, gnashing teeth, snorting hemlock and nightshade. When the soupy blight evenings return so will they, resurrected as crowns of thorn, in stinging hordes. Men have been known to go mad, screaming from the black bog turbary, blinded, groping for salvation in smoke-filled taverns, which they will not find again. Ni fheicfadh tú feasta iad!

Fever Fever

2009-07-22T00:00:00.005+01:00

To catch the moment of disconnection fever brings, to linger in that space between rational consciousness and raving blackness is a wonderful opportunity. With real and dangerous fever the difficulty would be the possibility of simply dying at the end of it and not being able to return with the fruits of discovery.

Is this a real and dangerous fever? I cannot see it so. But in the land of euphemism I pass as fully sighted. In point of fact I am a One-eyed Jack. The strangest thing is that since diabetes removed one of my eyes I see more than ever I did before.

Fever becomes as a kaleidoscope, a binocular, a viewfinder, a mirror, a microscope. It is a tool box full of optical miracles.

Fever and again fever. Through my shirt the smell of boiled cabbage seeps out. When I am sick I smell like a 1950s school dinner. The smell hardens and cakes on me, a thin coating of vanilla wax that flakes off when I turn and fills the bed with crumbs that smell of almonds. I remember the 1957 pandemic, the lines of iron beds, the coughing school boys, the smell of camphor and Dettol, the starched Matron in her razor sharp vestments stalking the early hours with her clipboard like a valkyrie.

Somewhere in the cottage I have forgotten to turn off the washing machine. It thumps and thumps like a drunken giant copulating doggedly in the kitchen without being able to reach a climax.

Long legged spiders hanging in the ceiling corners are eating midges like chips. They scatter their remains on the skirting board, seaside vandals dropping their garbage. Winkle shells crunch underfoot on the promenade. As I watch I see they are Christmas decorations left behind, long after Twelfth Night, glittering with dust. This is the evening of the Second Night.

I can hear the crass and audible prostitution of a TV talk show left behind in the akashic record. I think I am not well.

The handles on the dresser, art-designed from rods of welding iron, are in the shape of hands and fingers. When you sleep they reach out and gouge you. I do not sleep. There is no sleep in fever. I am running naked in the garden under the red spot of Mars, the night breeze cooling my eyes. In this black of night there are marvellous colours, the fever hues. It would be worth being febrile always to see this richness of reds and blues and woody tints. Fever: the Old Ram is just a little boy. Perhaps some night bug caught me as I wandered around naked among the lilies looking up at Mars blazing red yellow in the South. Perhaps Mars bit me. The fever came, red and yellow and then with a deluge of black scowers and then a descent into one of the Deep Dark Pits I so carefully keep like a secure safe deposit box in a secret distant country.

Painting Flashback

2009-07-21T14:24:00.010+01:00

The wind has come up fierce and ferocious today thrashing the bog cotton about like a classroom of wicked boys. It chased out the heat wave long before dawn. Instead of Tuscany I am back to Mayo. And here comes the rain to prove it, hard on the heels of the wind. It’s rattling round the window pane again as it was all winter. It strikes the glass like a shotgun blast. I had to run outside in my slippers and tie up the sunflowers in the flower bed; otherwise they’d have gone cart wheeling off over the turf like windmills.

I like it, this wind. It is July now, but it blows like winter. It blows through the cracks under the door and through the casements and right up my nose and I breath it into my brain. I can go back to the writing now with a head full of oxygen.

So that is a relief.

I thought I might die of guilt, spending all my time painting like that.

If there is a problem at all it is that I am obsessive. I came here to write, alone in this cottage with myself and the bogs and the boharins, swept in by the wind and the memories and the urgent need to get it all off my chest after sixty years of waiting.

But for the past month and two days, instead of writing I have been painting. They are great big unwieldy pictures on sheets of builder’s hardboard I bought water-damaged and at half-price from the hardware store in Kilkelly. Suddenly I wish to be Gauguin and Monet and Edward Hopper and Magritte and all at once and instantly and even so in my own unique spirit. And if I can’t get there within the hour, then it must be at least by the end of the month. After thirty three days there are so many masterpieces they will hardly fit into this neatly ordered universe. The cottage is bulging like a museum basement.

I have been painting night and day. Until today. The weather invited it. There has been a heat wave over Europe and it brought rare and reflected sunshine over Ireland. I have stood outside at the back door and painted everything I can see in all directions. I have captured every visible scene and many visible only to me and splashed so much paint around and about that the very ground begins to resemble something from the Museum of Modern Art and I am wading about in colour.

It has been a strange experience.

Since Miss Maggs beat the art out of me I had not thought about painting at all. I have done other things entirely with my life. And after all of that, I came here to write, for this is a place to stop living and give oneself over to reflection and perhaps death, or at least reflection about death.

It is a great palette itself of wild flowers and weather. Time here is not stopped, but it continues to move endlessly, revolving in the past. I think in Swinford, the 1950’s is the nearest it gets to today. I am at home here as I am at home in museums. They are full of what was once the familiar. That time is more real to me than the one that has come since. After all, I was alive then. Now I seem just to be tidying up after the party.

You see I am not reconciled to age. Sickness forces me to think about it, but only the numbers tell me the bad news, and numbers are only theoretical. Miss Maggs impressed on me their paramount importance and so I decided to delete them at once. I still look at a blackberry vine with the same emotion I looked at it in Polzeath but I do not count the thorns.

Flatpack Dreams

2009-07-19T14:41:00.006+01:00

"Bill heard a footfall close behind him. Then a foot fell on his head!
It must have been a Mammoth, or a Rabbit made of lead!
If he'd muttered HOCUS POCUS he would never have heard the swish
And the chuckle of a Mammoth as it hears a man go squish!"

Woke 5am unable to sleep further. Bathed dressed ate grey porridge and walked along the concrete path to my potatoes. They are white in flower this morning, apprehensive and proud. Little girls at their first communion. There is a change in the weather though. Blight is prowling. Across the blank sky clouds loiter like hoodies and the sun is an indifferent yellow presence in the east. On a scrap of washed denim a new moon has been discarded. Fingernail clipping.

The air is so damp and so heavy it hurts my arms. I feel I have an untried prosthesis screwed into me from hand to elbow, both sides. I am drained of energy; a flyhusk in a spider’s web. My safe path maze dusted with dry earth from yesterday’s gardening has been swept by a breeze in the night into a corrugated sand pattern, thin and brown. The breeze has failed by now and the earth crunches like salt under my clogs. I had intended writing but the weight of the sky weighs me down like a guilty thought. I am struggling up Everest with rocks in my backpack instead of oxygen.

Yesterday’s springy energy has left. I can hardly make it back to the cottage. Fully dressed I collapse into bed and pull the comforter up and without comfort become heavy metal. The burden of this air has flattened me. Stamped into a leaden album of dreams, I am licked, kicked, tricked, stuck down, forced to watch image after image as they cross my retina plaintively calling out to be confessed, absolved, forgotten, shouted loud in caves, muttered stealthily under the breath, farted out like thunder in polite company. Anything. Anything. Anything for some attention. And to be done with it.

Cunningly Engraved

2009-07-18T18:36:00.005+01:00

These days are unbelievable days for June. The sun rises at five fingering the morning mist as though it were a bride’s veil, and teases it for a while unobserved until the coast is clear. Then slowly at first and warming to the game it proceeds to romp naked into the high morning as if this were a chance for gratification which will never be repeated again. Which is most likely: I have perched on this island of bog and rock and wild grasses for seven years, watching the waters flow by and this is the first June when the earth has crackled under my feet like tortilla chips. It says: approach these Saharan fringes with care. Sand too can drown a man, waterless and bog-sucked under. Dry sand is deeper than you can imagine. It goes on for ever. And we after all are only grains of sand. Cunningly engraved though.

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

That is a man whose sacred groves are burnt.
He eats sand,
Fleeing a poisoned well.

Mark him passer-by.
Others have marked him before you.

Beyond this place
is the road to Ballaghadereen.
There is no sacrificing now in the oak cathedral.
The trees are cut
and hold up foreign churches.

See that hooded scarecrow
Blown in from treeless deserts?
Recognise the Ethiope
And know him.”

Fever

2009-07-18T10:33:00.005+01:00

Through the window beyond my blazing red comfort blanket one of my eyes follows the movement of Mulcahey's artfully arranged towels flying on the line in the sinking sunlight. They are sculpted by the Atlantic wind and wrapped in movement and alive with unbearable streaks of colour. I have never seen so many gradations of hue or such violently dyed texture. It pulses semophorously in my direction. I cannot read the message.

I close my eyes and after the pounding in my head fades away I have reset the clothes line in a meadow of my own lifetime. It seems only moments back but it is half a century and more. There is a gentle slope of grass and flowers not too different from my field here in Páirc Loch but with a green and white trim frame house up there to the right in the background high on a rise. I am lying sprawled and comfortable in the grass, looking up at the house. Michael’s world. It is not exactly the picture you might remember. For that matter it is not precisely the one I know, but the perspective is true and it fits in its deep particulars.

I have added more than the washing. There are two square cows looking on made of planks and painted barn red. I found them in Alberta one afternoon, travelling with the lady harpists across that brilliant and empty desert of grass, on a ranch of wooden animals where the only flesh and blood was the rancher, and he was almost as dried out as his planky animals. And in my picture there are three hardboard sunflowers spilling their shadows jerkily onto the ground like whirligigs as the sun becomes a crescent and slides away down the back end of the afternoon.

I lie in the grass and remember a time of complete loneliness and safety. The place was Compton. It was in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. There was nothing there either, apart from maple sugar and wild strawberries and turtles half as big as barrels and bullfrogs twice as big as truth.
That was before they sent me away to boarding school where I soon learned why turtles have shells and wasps have stings. I learned about self defence long before I learned that you could run away. But once I found out about running I never looked back.

Backflash

2009-07-18T00:48:00.007+01:00

Bill was a Mammoth Basher.

It was a beastly shame!
He'd bashed up all the Mammoths
Wot once freely roamed the plain.
Except the Biggest Mammoth,
Who had expressed the wish
To put his foot down hard on Bill
And listen to the squish.

It didn't bother Bill at all. He often beat his chest,
And clothed his insecurity with anti-mammoth jest.
But he kept his eyes on the horizon,
And he never went to bed,
Till all his wives said: “This ain't good enough!
We want that Mammoth dead!”

It is isolated here, up on the bog, in the far corner of Europe. And yet it is amazingly connected with the rest of the world. I am too rooted in an earlier age. I do not think I am yet reconciled to the internet, although it has become my umbilical cord to my islands of the past spread around the world. Twenty years ago the telephone had not reached Curryaun. Now television is horrifying and irresistible. I find it all the more unbalancing to step outside at night to have a pee, and see the sky aswirl with brilliant stars and Mars rising huge and yellow over Tom’s blackthorn hedge and then the moon suddenly splashed out like a broken egg among the torn white clouds. The only sound is the strange vibration of the night jar as it turns in the darkness above the house.

I watched television last night, drinking as much cider as my day’s exercise ration told me was expedient and my diabetes would permit. It was not enough; but then it never is. This illness prohibits excess, and excess has been my place of refuge for as long as I can remember. I am left fighting against myself on all fronts. It makes no difference that I have dropped the old persona. The ghostly form of my amputated nature still hovers around me and I can still feel the pains and aches in it. I am told that if I disobey I shall die sooner than I wish, but that if I do what the doctors tell me there is still a chance that I may stay alive long enough to find out if there is another life after the one I have already trashed.

The film I watched on television was a good one, but bloody. It was chosen to steer my taste away from Schwarzenegger, so far as that is possible. It was an art film and so as well as murder there was lunacy and a substantial opportunity for me to empathise with the protagonists and to recognise their reflection in me. Schwarzenegger is easier. He works on me like an extra gallon of cider without adding to my blood sugar. But I am always half-open to some self-improvement, particularly since my favourite methods of self-destruction are now beyond my reach and I am under a modicum of supervision.

After the film C turned in, and I stepped outside the cottage for my final look at the stars and then followed her to bed and fell past her into a cidery sleep as suddenly as if I had stepped off a cliff. I must have taken the film with me and we hit the ground together harder than I would have wished, for when I awoke this morning it was embedded in my head and I was convinced I had murdered C during the night as she slept.

There was no warmth beside me and no movement in her quarter of the bed.

I hesitate to open my eyes in the morning without an hour or so of pre-emptive consideration and I lay awake for a while feeling the desperate hands of the sheet clutch at my body until it was sure I was still alive. When I had woken enough to find the strength I to called out her name. Her answering grunt relieved me immensely but remnants of my dream still clung to me like a hangover.

Anniversary

2009-07-16T21:55:00.007+01:00

"The moon rises above the rocky spine of the island chalking the brittle harbour dusty white,
like an impatient customs officer telling us to go.

There’s no colour under this Aegean moon, only a pallid sky.
It reaches unsympathetically through the window

and marks Passed across your shoulders.
No stars in the sky now, but the floor is still white with moonbeams. They flow over your toes like spilt milk.

No use crying over that."

She was sitting just off to my right at the side of the stage.
It was an important night. It was the night I first knew what it meant to perform.
She smiled. I smiled back. She had full lips and a lot of mascara around her eyes.

That night I sang a song and noticed for the first time the attention of the audience. I had never felt this intensity before. I had sung the words, got through the chords; that was it. This time I felt a tension, an expectation in the darkness after the first few lines. How am I to explain it? I paused, scarcely a pause, but I could feel the hidden crowd lean towards me, waiting for the word. I felt I could delay it for ever. When finally I spoke it it dropped into the blackness like a pebble dropped carefully into an invisible pond. I felt the ripples spread out. I felt them come back to me. I was in control. I knew then what I would do for the rest of my life. This was the triumph of temptation. Did I get lost at that moment, or did I need all this first, before I arrived here?

Afterwards we drank together and walked back to my pension through the cold streets. Her name was Jacqueline. She was half French, half Greek. Mostly French.
She wore a black coat with a big feathery fur collar that evening. And high heeled impractical patent leather shoes that clicked and clacked on the flagstones as we made our way through the shuttered streets. And I was victorious. I had discovered applause. I was Alexander the Great. The moon shone down clapping her chalky hands from high above the Acropolis. White flowers fell into the alleys around us as we walked together.

In my cupboard sized room Jacqueline took off her coat and I hung it in the wardrobe with my guitar. That, apart from the bed, was the only furniture. The door was a mirror. It beamed us back on ourselves and showed us how we thought we were. She was wearing a tight red dress. I lay on her, wrinkling it, and fell asleep immediately, triumphant after my first victory.

"The fist night I made love to an audience
I walked back to my lodgings through the sleeping Athenian streets
and cold stiletto footsteps clapped me
all the way home.

Above the Acropolis
the moon applauded icily,
dropping chill white flowers
where my feet would fall.

Since my victory
I have bought your red silk concupiscence
as easily as a late night souvlaki.

Walk the streets by my side, if you want.
Applause is a whore’s embrace,
It grips me tighter than anything your thin arms could offer.

In the streets of the Plaka
crushed magnolia petals lie like dead snakes on the morning flagstones.
I am envenomed now.
These blossoms have bruised my heel."

Flashback

2009-07-16T10:39:00.004+01:00

I wake up.

Morning sunlight has burst into the room and the two paintings on the wall are lit as though they have been placed under the glare of a spotlight. They shimmer and change before my eyes and the colour glazes seemed to hover over the surface and then dart about the canvas like dragonfly wings, making the pictures pulse with energy. They seem almost to be breathing.

I have never looked at my work in this way before. Even while painting I had been aware of them only as if they had been two pieces of writing, carefully put together, grammatically conscious of the rules they must obey, and well behaved. I had thought of them as cerebral creations and little more than descriptions of the scenes they showed.

But now I see that there is something else. They are giving me back something that I had not put into them.

Perhaps it was the sunlight. Perhaps it was because that day I had actually woken up and opened my eyes immediately. I am not as quick as a matter of course, to move from sleeping to waking. It may be the weather here on the bog. Usually I wake to the sound of rain drumming on the tin roof of the red barn or the wind keening in the telephone wires.

I had been deeply asleep, wandering, as I often do now, in those fearful and decrepit places where dreams live uneasily and mutter things to us we would be well advised to remember.

On the stripped pine dresser by the side of the bed my morning mug of tea already waited. She must have put it there quite recently. It was smoking gently in the sunshine like a carefully placed votive offering. I still enjoy thinking like this, in terms of rites and rituals. It helps to nail the day down and keep it in place for a little moment longer. The mug is large and blue with a picture of a fat pink pig on the side. It is ample and it is appropriate.

There are other paintings hanging on the walls all around the room, framed meticulously, as though they needed to be sedated, like wild animals in care. Her paintings and my paintings; but mostly mine, for she is a Virgo, with a justice that touches on self-effacement. Her frames are like painted cages and in themselves are works of art.

These canvases all amaze me, but none so much as mine, for I have never called myself a painter, or thought to call myself one, until this moment.

She had opened the window to air the room, and the breeze gusted suddenly against the curtains and armfuls of light fell all over her furniture overturning the shadows. I try to move, but my body is like a sheet of hammered lead, sunk into the damp of the mattress. I wonder: “Is this old age or sickness?” I would reject them both. It can’t be time yet. But I am wary to throw them summarily out. I feel like a host at a large party confronted with two gatecrashers. Their faces are familiar but I cannot quite place them. I dare not make a scene, for although I cannot remember inviting them, I am not completely sure I did not.

“How strange,” I think, “How strange to start on a journey like this now, at my age.”

2009-07-15T16:14:00.004+01:00

"And where are you now?
Striding out along the dykes,
slender amongst the bullrushes and yellow buttercup.
Down by the rusty river,
where brooks run in and rot in the shifty backwaters,
and the frog legions croak their gluttonous victory of flies."

The Vegetarian Cat

2009-07-15T15:49:00.001+01:00

I've got a vegetarian cat.
Don't ask me how, Me-ow! Me-ow God made him one. He's just like that.
Don't ask me how, Me-ow!

When he patrols his bailliwick
The mice come out and chat.
They say: “Silly old Puss, you can't catch us!
You're a Vegetarian Cat!”

He smiles.
He looks them up.
He looks them down.
He takes a bow.

Then he beats out their brains with a rhubarb stick!
Me-ow! Me-ow! Me-ow!

Waking

2009-07-15T15:19:00.002+01:00

“Sleep, sleep,
sleep beneath my spider-headed crown
in these arms,
silken, crimson, deadly,
till you awake to the harsh screech of an eagle
teaching its young to fly!”

It is that kind of morning and that kind of an awakening. Beaten awake by lilies I emerge into the day, regretfully, leaving something behind that seemed dear once and yet is already forgotten.