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 s
tory 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.
