Happy Birth / Mother's Day Mum

I suppose there will come a time in the not too distant future when I will stop posting about my mother. Not yet though, not when her birthday coincides with Mother's Day just over a year since she died.

My wife reminded me, as usual. And it did occur to me that my wife should be included, being a mother. So I sneaked out of the house this morning and dithered in Superquinn (M&S wasn't open yet), feeling like a pathetic twit trying to decide what would be appropriate, thought-wise, price-wise, protocol-wise in general. I hadn't a clue really, so I bought the usual for both of them; that is, a thin but elegant clutch of lilies (5 Stems For The Price of 3) for my wife and and a bunch of yellow-red tulips for mum. My wife had already bought some potted pansies to put on mum's grave a few days before. I thought I might take both these and the tulips to lay on her plot in Deansgrange. But then I thought that the tulips will be nice to have in the house, as a little tribute to mum, and they'll last here for a little while longer out of the forecasted snow.

I ended up driving there in the late afternoon with my cousin Fiachra, whom I had picked up so that he could come back here and do some work on my computer (our docklands project). The cemetery was busy, full of impatient-seeming drivers weaving too quickly in and out of those parked on the double yellow. We found the grave fairly easily. I had a basic idea where it was, just off the path near where the main road takes a slight bend, a tall wall to the right and two statues of the Virgin on the left (mum's near the second, more immaculate one). Fiachra was the one who spotted it first. It's my grandparents' grave, the dark headstone not yet bearing mum's name.

My mother never visited any graves as far as I recall. She didn't put much stock in the death-stuff. What do you say to a grave? Anything I suppose. I stood facing the stone, as many do: solemn rituals under the slab-coloured wintery sky, a cold wind getting into gear. I didn't wait, just picked up the dead carnations and roses we'd left there on her death's anniversary last month, set down the pansies, said happy birthday and headed back to the car.

[photo of mum and the wean taken 2 years ago on her 92nd birthday]

A Dream In Colour

I am reposting this image for a reason.

I had another dream about mum, this morning just before I woke late (having fallen asleep again after being woken earlier by the wean on the rampage).

It was more an image than a narrative. I was looking at a large colour photograph of her (not at all like the one above) sitting asleep in a dressing gown in an armchair, viewed from the side. Her head had fallen back on the headrest. Behind her there was a long bed, and behind this something else, another chair perhaps. The composition was perfectly balanced and very striking, especially since the dominant element was the tall broad wall (with possibly a single unshaded lightbulb burning) that rose to the ceiling above mum, bed, etc. The wall was painted a very strong colour, a kind of turquoise. I remember being surprised that the composition was so good; in fact the photograph was very powerful and haunting. It wasn't taken by me, but, I initially thought, by my uncle Niall.

Was I handed this photograph or did it come in an envelope or just appear before me? I can't remember. I knew what it meant though, or part of the story behind it. Mum had taken part in what I thought of as a 'dream trial' (more correctly sleep experiment). Perhaps this is why I thought Niall (who was a doctor) had taken the photograph. But in the dream I eventually became convinced that he hadn't taken it. Someone else had, a photographer who would have cared about composition, colour, etc.

One of the reasons I think the dream may be of some importance (though only to me of course) is that I am rarely conscious of having dreamed in colour. It probably relates to the image above: my mother with her eyes closed. I even suggested, in that piece, that she looks as if she's having a nice dream. It may also have something to do with my hoping to find some clues as to my natural father's whereabouts. My mother once told me that Niall had hired a private detective and managed to actually trace my father (who was married by that stage). She couldn't offer any details though and when I asked my uncle he said he had no recollection of this, and perhaps she was mistaken. So the information/documentation, like the dream photo, will have to come from another source. Or it may be that the dream is more about simply missing my mother. After all, if she is sleeping she can wake up. 

A Date

Something inside me must believe in the occult gravity of anniversaries, even if I can't really see how the fact that my mother died exactly one year ago today makes this day any more significant than yesterday or tomorrow. But humans abide by rituals, and I am, in my secular way, as ritualistic as any church-goer.

So driving back from Wexford to Dublin earlier this evening it hit me, surely as a cloudful of rain skittering across the windscreen. Perhaps it was all the stronger because I'd spent the day with my cousins Pat, Dave, Fiachra, Niall and his son; a satisfyingly busy day photographing and bubble-wrapping Pat's paintings (which we had also spent hours doing yesterday) and loading them into a removal van, to be driven to my inlaws' place, where there was a spare stable to store his life's work (approx 500 paintings and drawings) and give his house in Bray some real breathing space. I hadn't had time to dwell on the day that was in it. My wife Sam and I had meant to visit mum's grave that afternoon with some flowers, but this plan had to be abandoned. Sam needed to get her car NCT'd in Dublin so she left before I did. Once on the road I had nothing but my thoughts as a companion.

There is something about that familiar 50 minute drive, alone in the car's hermetic dream-space, the road smoothly swerving or rolling over long straight hills, anthropomorphic ivied tree-silhouettes, evening coming on, the Sugarloaf sailing its dark fin. My mother used to enjoy driving before she gave it up prematurely in her 50s. But it wasn't only that. The anniversary of course is part of it, as is the loss of a routine that had developed over the years when I was caring for mum; whenever I left her for a few hours or (when she was less dependent) overnight, I would call her the moment I arrived and let her know when I was on the way back. Now, the absence of the need to make these calls intensifies a sense of heaviness that is also lightness, a phantom wind-resistance, that is also a kind of parting, in which the passing landscape appears less (or more) real.

All these things are part of it, but the feeling has overtaken me before on this (and sometimes other) longish drives, even when mum was still alive. What else then? What stirring, what embedded pattern, surge, cascade of chemicals setting off memories and half-memories, spirit-stuff, ripples in the neural net? Whatever it was/is, I continue to miss her. I wish I could believe in her continuing, being out there in some quantum time-leased apartment, something more than dispersed carbon, her breath now the wind's fucking poetry.  

I often think of something a friend of mine, Johnny, said to me shortly after mum died: when your parents die you become an orphan. This is I suppose especially true in my case because I never knew my father and was brought up an only child (though I have a wonderful half brother I later met). I've been lucky though, with my mother, my wife, son and some very close friends/relations.

I took the photo above a few years ago, for a disabled driving ID that enabled me to park in wheelchair slots when mum was in the car. She closed her eyes at one point, an involuntarily moment that made her appear youthful: as if she's having a good dream, or someone has told her to close her eyes, make a wish.

Orbits

"My mind goes round my brain like the earth goes round the sun."

Stopping For The Twelve Apostles

So this is where the land goes

south: pink crumbling stacks,

geology on speed, earth-clouds.

So fast when one of them dropped

its brittle link with the mainland ––

‘London Bridge’ fallen to

‘London Arch’ –– the abrupt island

supported a population: two

startled tourists on hold

for a helicopter. I point my camera

into the wind’s wall, snap

another oblong of grandeur

(bite-sized, as befits

its current misnomer: the twelve

eroded to nine). As if

this balcony needs a wardrobe

of pantomime robes and fake beards

while the older names are still

nodding at us –– The Sow

and Piglets, Place Of Many Heads ––

up close and at bay

as the many-headed file

that shuffles past, clicks, turns

like a turnstile, except for

this couple in hoodies (though hers
is a kind of hooded coat
more like a blanket)

huddled together on the rim
of the flashes and grins,
wind-buffeted, slightly desperate

to pocket each other –– backed
into the guardrail,
having unpacked that portable

bedroom wall, the landscape
that matters. 

Well, that's the first thing I thought of when I read Katy's blog  today. I've been tinkering with the thing for years, ever since I went to Melbourne on a Vincent Buckley Poetry Fellowship in 2004. It never occurred to me that today might be numerically significant in any way. 12.12.12 = an excuse to post a poem and photo. But who needs excuses?

The other twelve that came to mind were the twelve kids I did a poetry workshop with earlier today, at the invitation of Tom Connaughty, the principal. They were a delight, and the two hours passed like a dream. 

The Man In The Moon R.I.P.

Just last August it was Neil Armstrong. Now another moon man has gone. While Armstrong made his 'giant leap' and left those griddled boot-prints on that windless scape, Moore was always the Man in the Moon, and not only because his monacle enhanced the likeness; the moon was his main obsession and speciality. Although nothing on the moon is named after him, he discovered and named the Eastern Sea, or Mare Orientale. He also discovered the 'transient lunar phenomenon', lingering glowing patches of light on the surface, a surface which he had already mapped in so much detail (before the NASA Apollo missions) that the Russians used his charts to correlate their first pictures of the far side. No wonder his first work of fiction was called Master of the Moon. Moore was far from transient himself. The first programme in 'The Sky At Night' aired the same month I was born, April 1957. Below is a short sequence I have been tinkering with for the past few months:    

         THE SKY AT NIGHT

At Farthings*

We meet the monocled Man

in the Moon, who couldn’t care less

how he comes across, gruff, infectious

schoolboy, knockabout clown ––

reserving a Tory scowl

for women, gays (saluting Enoch Powell) ––

speaking in Spitfire bursts,

never sunk, always immersed

stardusted, drunk

on the wealth of that spilled purse.

A Field, Schull, West Cork, 1973

Mark it, the first, and so far

only time I slept in the open

gazing up into the vaults ––

brushed by a passing

inquisitive summer rain ––

tasting the pattern.

Light Verse

To see how deeply grooved

everything is, leave your camera set

at 30 seconds, gaping on a cloudless night.

Neither analogue nor digital,

old starlight’s always cut with a needle ––

silver-plated, pristine, pulled

from the earth’s dark sleeve, each track

is authentic, a classic.

Bun a tSleibh, County Wicklow

A clear, cold night, earth-lit

by the tip of my friend’s cigarette.

I pointed and traced the arc-weld

of The Milky Way, filling his head

with stars, distances, density –– ‘Fuck off,

sure that’s only a bit of old smoke.’

A Last Word From Our Host

At 82, in an interview,

asked if he believes in god or if ‘all matter’

came from the Big Bang: ‘Ask me that

in ten years and I’ll be able to tell you.’

*The name of Sir Patrick Moore’s house.

Dream: Host-Making

Dreamed one of the strangest dreams last night. I woke with it fresh in my head, fell asleep again and forgot about it till a couple of hours ago, shortly before I went to bed.

The dream appeared to be in two stages (or scenes), like a short film. What I can remember is this:

Stage 1: a logged tree was being processed inside some large noisy machine. Sparks were flying, branches had been sheared off and the trunk was being brutally reduced to a kind of softened white pith.

Stage 2: Bits of processed tree (the size and shape of round loaves?) were floating along a slow stream inside a low arched tunnel. Workers in ragged clothes were stooping and tearing pieces of the wood, putting them in their mouths and chewing till these became a kind of softened bolus. The work was sacred, holy, because I somehow understood (though I don't think this was stated or illustrated in any way) that these bits of chewed white wood were being collected and, at a further stage, would eventually become consecrated communion hosts.