Brexit: The Movie

Is it really as clear

as those signs at the rear
whose letters in green
distract from the screen

(where Nigel and Boris
make a Carry On Norris
flag-waving the fleets
that are under his sheets)

or is all this 'greatness'
the tang of a tasteless
and placeless Armada
amounting to nada?

The Hosting

It is a king’s work, this hosting

of all of Adam’s seed,

and yet is it no work, nothing

at all, and it proceeds.

No sooner do they know

than they study to forget

where the hosting goes –

no one is ready yet.

When you are called forth,

if you refuse to leave,

in whose house, whose fort

will you stand siege?

After 'The Last Call-Up' (from A Golden Treasury of Irish Poetry, Ed. David Greene & Frank O'Connor), an anonymous poem of 17 stanzas originally published in the 15th century Book of Lecan.

First published as part of a short sequence, Departures (long after the Irish, AD 600-1200), in my collection Fade Street (Salt, 2010).

Photo: Stéig, an iron age (AD 400) fort in the Ring of Kerry.

            

Unanswers

Looking for god is like asking directions for the edge of the earth. –– Stephen Hawking

In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded. –– Terry Pratchett

Before the Big Bang, no time, so no room for god

crushed against solid Nothing. We should

be ‘pretty pleased’. No need to fear god now

(though what scares most of us is that paler shadow

at the back of our group photo of devils and gods).

*

At the quantum level we’ve seen a photon pop

into existence from nothing –– why not

‘the ultimate free lunch’? So something has come

of nothing: my appetite’s gone. Bear with me

Flying Spaghetti Monster made of string theory.

*

The unnameable was always a human name

even as it shrank from having a finger put on it ––

sunbeam touching the nerve in a passage tomb,

god of the minded gap, the sucked thumb,

cloud of unknowing breathed on a window pane.

*

What if god comes with the bubble-wrap, the fold

between universes, blacker than black rose

bundled into the mother of all black holes?

What if time is a sliced pan, each moment

self-preserved, fresh as the day it was born?

Moseying along the path at the edge of the cliff ––

agnostic heartbeat: what if, what if, what if  




from Haunt, Salmon, 2015

Lines For The Diceman

i. m. Thom McGinty

Good to know you might turn up

in the frieze of faces on Grafton Street,

familiar stranger surprising us

in something from your wardrobe-gallery,

a walking painting say, holding its own

gilded ornate frame, the face

white as a mask, Mona Lisa

in a black cat-suit, cracking a murky smile.

Dead-slow, solemnly careful

among eddies of Christmas shoppers, summer dawdlers,

tourists, street-traders, Guards...

mindful of each sound-proofed step, sure-

footed as an acrobat, spaced in, treading your own

high wire. When we looked

at you looking through us

we took in the joke that jumped -- a spark of silence --

eye to eye, mind to mind,

across Grafton Street's  canyon of swirling clockwork noise.

You're gone now forever (back

into the box with Jack)

and scanning the quickslow, giddy, sedate

everyday street-portrait  ---  its procession

of invisible masks  --- the eye misses you.

Old master, Diceman, conductor

of the ungrooved thought, catcher

of the thrown glance, are you still there?

The Reverse

–– Cornelius Gijsbrechts, 1670

Although his trompe l’oeil, ‘The Reverse

of a Painting’, is intended to deceive,

one double-take is all it takes to leave

the expected for the micro-universe:

nested rectangles, the frame’s pale grain, the buff

canvas stretched and pinned with tiny tacks,

the price on a ticket fixed with sealing wax ––

range-findings, star-charts, more than enough.

Beyond a trick then, his scrupulous look

at what is overlooked –– details that wait

behind what hangs in MoMA or The Tate ––

lifted the world of appearance off its hook,

turned it to the wall and then applied

equal pressure to the other side.

          from Haunt (Salmon Poetry, 2015)

Present

Two surprises this morning.

Firstly, just before waking, I met two alive-dead people in a dream. One was the vice principal of the art school I attended in Dún Laoghaire (now the IADT), Trevor Scott. Trevor later became a friend, then he died prematurely from cancer in the early noughties, at 58, a year older than I am now.

In my dream Trevor was judging some kind of exhibition/show. I expected to get a prize and was disappointed when Trevor awarded the prize to someone else without mentioning my work (whatever that may have been, a photograph?). Then I was talking to Trevor and somehow my mother came into the conversation. Trevor spoke warmly about her. I think he said she was a very kind person. Then, as happens in dreams, my mother was there in the room, in a wheelchair I think, with a shawl over her knees, as she would have been in her last years if she were out and about. I went to her and I think she told me she loved me, and I began to weep and told her that I would always love her, and we embraced. Though I have been aware of mum's shadowy presence the odd time, this is the first time I recall actually speaking to her in a dream since she died two years ago. When I woke I wondered about this, then remembered it was my birthday.

Getting out of bed, I was led into the kitchen by our son, to be presented with a birthday gift, a chocolate cake and other goodies, and a big happy birthday hug from him and my wife (and he later made me a lovely little birthday card in school).

The photo above was taken from outside, looking through the window, and shows mum in her chair, among the evening reflections.

A Birthday

My mother was born on this day in 1918. She died just over two years ago. In the top photo she's on the right, standing next to her sister Moira. They were the eldest in a family of seven. Moira died not long before my mother (about a year or so) at 95.

I took the middle photo while on holiday with her in 2001. That's another sister, Nuala, on the right (under the sunhat). I have my cousins to thank for urging me to take this holiday, something I should have done far more often with her. Though it became a nightmare towards the end of those two weeks (9/11 took place and Nuala had a stroke on the day we departed), the first week was something of an idyll.

The lower photo was taken on the day before her last birthday in 2011 (she was going into the nursing home the next day for her two week 'intermittent stay').

I think about my mother every day: amalgam of memories, a presence at once both vivid and vague, the vitality she lost as she grew older and more dependent, the pain she went through increasingly with osteoarthritis ('singing in my bones' as she'd say).

I had remembered this was her birthday up till yesterday. This morning, I must have had other things on my mind because it didn't hit me till the early afternoon. Nuala's birthday was on the 10th of March and I regularly muddled the dates, so that might have had something to do with it.

Her siblings are almost all dead now, apart from her older brother Dermot, whom I spoke to not long ago. He's in his nineties and apparently in good health.

There's a poem I was working on till I abandoned it recently. I'll post the last draft here because it relates to my mother, but it's another person's memory of her, the younger brother Niall who died in November 2012. On our way back from yet another funeral (Nuala's) Niall told me about this, hence the title:

Something My Uncle Said

Not long before he died, following my mother

and her sisters, he passed me this blurry memory,

somewhere in England –– Liverpool? ––

he is a schoolboy getting off the train

to change for another, the one

that will take him home to Burnham on Sea

(for one of those holidays that are made for 
rhapsodising, squinting back along the tracks

at Shangri-La filmed through a Vaselined lens).

His older sister, my mother, is there to meet him

and see him safely home –– guardian

who will takes him walking on the dunes

and reads him Winnie The Pooh and AA Milne.

I didn’t ask whether he finds her immediately or

has to look for her, because

something else is there too, off to the side,

the soundtrack he will carry with him through the years:

relentless thunder of bombs and presumably sirens,

the war I only ever heard of or saw in films.

An extra, I keep coming to that station

to stand among the noise and clots of steam

and the too-close sounds of something else, out

of my world, punching great industrial holes

in the ordinary noises of a city,

making me search harder for a face

milling among the faces on the platform,

blank, intent or bewildered as my own.

Tis The Season To Be haunted

Here's a list of what I believe are some of the best ghost stories I've come across. I use the term 'ghost story' fairly loosely. Let's say these are stories concerned with visits by, or encounters with, presences who may be considered as from beyond any earthly plot, such as the caller in Joyce Carol Oates' unsettling story. I'm leaving out novels for now, though I was delighted to be invited to write an introduction to a forthcoming special edition of one of the greatest ghost novels I've read, Thomas Tessier's Fog Heart. The best ghost stories may not always be the scariest, but those are the ones I prefer. I also enjoy the occasional merging of ghost and horror story (as in Bowen's 'Demon' or Greene's 'Little Place...'), but I have zero interest in 'splatter' or 'shock' horror; such relish in blood-letting always seems to me to be the equivalent of cheap CGI, i.e. non-special effects.

Please feel free to add, but only stories that scared you shitless (or at least gave you a genuine shiver, the sensation of someone walking over your grave):

Elizabeth Bowen: 'The Demon Lover'
Joyce Carol Oates: 'Where Is Here?'
Ray Bradbury: 'The Emissary'
M.R. James: 'Oh, Whistle, And I'll Come To You, My Lad', 'A School Story'
Graham Greene: 'A Little Place Off the Edgeware Road', 'The End of the Party'
Rosemary Timperley: 'Harry'
Stephen King: '1048', 'The Man in the Black Suit', 'Gramma'
Robert Hichens: 'How Love Came to Professor Guildea'
Roddy Doyle: 'The Pram'
A.M. Burrage: 'The Sweeper'
H.G. Wells: 'The Red Room'
L.P. Hartley: 'WS'
Joe Hill: 'Last Breath'

A few of the writers on this list, such as M.R. James or Joyce Carol Oates, have probably written so many good ghost/scary stories that deserve their own lists. And I am certain that I have forgotten many stories by other writers that are perhaps as good as these. I simply put down those I found unforgettable.

A note on how I structured the list: I have placed Elizabeth Bowen's 'The Demon Lover' at the top of the list because it is marvellous, one of the most beautifully written (and disturbing) stories I've ever read. Oates' is another gem so it comes second, etcetera.

Roald Dahl published what may well be the best anthology of ghost stories a couple of decades ago (I'd love to see a better one), simply called 'Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories'. In his intro he noted that some of the very greatest ghost stories are by women, such as Timperley's 'Harry', which Dahl's book introduced me to. I think every good writer attempts at least one from time to time, and Roddy Doyle's 'The Pram' is an excellent newcomer.

PS
The title of my forthcoming collection (of poetry rather than ghost stories) is 'Haunt'.

Storm-Chased

Another dream-post. Just wanted to record an odd one I woke from early this morning. A landscape/weather dream.

I was somewhere in a countryside similar to Wicklow. Can't recall who I was with but I noticed, on the slope of a neighboring mountain (like The Sugarloaf), a curious disturbance in a slate-dark raincloud. It was trailing a kind of thin vortex or mini-tornado. As I watched, mesmerised, I gradually became aware that the tornado was spreading, widening, becoming absurdly broad. And it appeared to be approaching.

The rest of the dream is a vague, anxious muddle. I think there was an attempt to escape in a car, which wouldn't start. Also an impression of others fleeing, on possibly blocked roads. Not a fully fledged nightmare, the trappings never quite cohered into that all-engulfing dread that rocks you awake with a dry mouth and hammering heart. But it was real enough while I was in it. And that morphing slaty cloud is with me still. 

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 Conaty, 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.

Dürer: Six Pillows

A pillow-fight-crossword on paper,

two across, three down, each character

is crosshatched, sculpted, made stand

up for itself, a face pulled

and patted, twisted, plumped

tipsy and crumple-drunk

as insomnia (a lamp left on

numbingly bright in the brain)

or it might be impressions left

by three couples who’ve slipped

out for something, their pillows

keeping their talks on hold.

A Late Addition To The Lament

(for Norman MacCaig, on his birthday)

He has drappit the mirk-daurk craig

on hummle, muckle Norman MacCaig:

wan-fag, twa-fag, at lang-an-last three: ––

Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Photo: Statue of The Prince Consort, Edinburgh Book Fair, 2010

Spares (part 3)

Two sensations that remain married in my mouth: the delectable shock of the first kiss and the first oyster.

Every parade is asking to be rained on.

The best sex is always close to comedy. Within minutes, seconds, an ominous iceberg melts to a tiny puddle, a drawbridge slaps down on a fort that’s become a bouncy castle, rectitude vanishes, high moral ground hasn’t a hope.  

The gods are born jealous, and will always be shrill and demanding as colicky babies. Attempting to dress them in the grown-up clothes of The Enlightenment always looks silly.

More Spares

The muddied colours of sleep, the mind mixing its palette.

The veneration for the opaque, hermetically sealed poem suggests a kind of hopeful necrophilia: listening intently for that muffled knocking, the corpse masturbating in its coffin.

On Radio 4, a woman on the joys of wandering naked in a garden with fellow naturists, sniffing the roses, etc. As if, while enacting a reversal of Adam and Eve’s discovery, they should forget to notice each other’s nakedness, forget to notice each other. And that, essentially, is what ‘naturism’ is, dressing for indifference, as if this were, somehow, a virtue.

The oldest ‘profession’ is hardly something as civilised as a prostitute. Instead, try: hunter / torturer / executioner.

Everyone nourishes a secret desire to be owned, my people.

The Poet’s Lounge: the one place where they are obliged, by law, to serve language that’s 100 proof.

That tabloid shriek of disgust –– ‘Animals!’ –– is an unforgivable insult to the whale, the shrike, the hyena.

Human and humane are almost always antonyms.  

Recently I heard a respected scientist declare that he never gives anything to beggars. Ideally, every good scientist is equipped with a well-honed curiosity and a hunger for evidence. To dismiss beggars en masse, on no evidence apart from their status as indigent people, suggests a profound lack of equipment. It is very bad science.

Auden (who sang the praises of the permeable limestone landscape) called poetry ‘memorable speech.’ I think great, or even just good, poems should have at least an element of this; they should resonate in the way that a good song or piece of music does. If they manage this I will forgive them much, including a good deal of impermeability.