About to plop
Down into Davy Jones’s locker?
Where be your swashbuckling now?
Your hip-hop-hip mating?
Your waistcoated machismo?
Where be all your cheek-to-cheek glowing?
Your eyebrow-to-eyebrow acrobatics?
Where be all your toe-to-toe conniving?
You are being struck down,
Having glowed, having connived.
Neither being seen nor being heard
But tomorrow in a scrap of newscasting
On ABC:
‘Irish poet trapped in rips,
Washed up between the Heads
Of Sydney Harbour.’
Ocean – compleat ocean – clenches me
In its JCB claws,
Hissing at me that this time there’ll be no pause
And my brains gape down upon my own terror.
In the vice of drowning I know
I have no power, my fate
Decided, all I can
Be said to be doing is lingering;
Out of my depth, flailing
Legs, arms, caterwauling
In my kitty
And meekly screaming – I am lingering;
Fresh blows the breeze from off the bow;
My Irish boy, where lingerest thou?
This fling in which you’re lingering
Will last but seconds and after
You will be but a thing
Flung against the automatic sliding doors
Of the sea’s casino.
My father and mother
Each a wowser
Resenting one another,
Resented me
Because I was a bother.
How so much better
It would have been
Not to have given birth
To such a bother.
All presumption walloped o’er the horizon,
All my naïveté, all my toxic pride,
All my vanity, all my conceit.
There is nothing I can do – I realize –
Except shout, bawl, cry, whimper.
In the cot of the sea,
On the rails of the waves
I bang my little knuckles.
The sea seethes:
Paul Durcan, you are
The epitome of futility.
I cry out ‘Help! Help!’
But no one hears me.
A cry? I –
Did I ever reply
To a cry?
A cry of a tiny, frail Scotsman
In a damp basement bedsit
In Buckingham Palace Road
Choking on his own loneliness?
Aye! A cry!
Nobody hears me, the dead man!
I cry out again with all my ego.
The about-to-be-overtaken sprinter
At the finishing line,
Lunging one last futile fingertipslength.
The ocean is the mighty woman
You have hunted all your life.
But now that she has got you
In the palm of her hand –
In her thimble of no reprieve! –
You are crying out ‘Help!’
She is moulding her knuckles around you.
You are her prey.
This is the yarn you will not live to spin,
The blackest yarn,
A groundswell is spinning out your life
At once slowly, speedily –
A groundswell no longer a cliché
But a mother of death!
You are a puppet out of your depth
And your legs are diced dancers
Dangling from deadwood,
Thrashing in their throes
Out of sight slipping.
The sea is a headless goddess
All flesh sans eyes sans mouth.
Paul Durcan, this is one lady
Through whose eyes and mouth,
Through whose free looks
You will not talk your way.
HELP!
My teensy-weensy voicette fetches
Over the uncut surf and the sealed ocean
To two young men who shout back –
Their seal heads bobbing a quarter-mile off –
Something like ‘Hold on! Hold on!’
And blubbering I pant for breath
As my head slides beneath the waves,
My shoulders caving in,
My paunch of guts dragging me down,
My kidneys wincing,
My crimson ankles skipping,
My snow-white fetlocks like faulty pistons
Halting for the last time.
I can hear myself sobbing ‘O God, O God!’
Floating downwards with every surge;
Hurtling upwards with every heave.
‘O Christ, I don’t want to die!
After all that church-going and hymn-singing
This is not the only life I know
But it’s the only life I want!
I WANT TO LIVE!’
They clutch me round the neck
And flail and thrash to lug me shorewards.
A third joins them – an off-duty lifeguard
Called Brian who happens to be doing
A stint of training – but the breaking rollers
At each crash uppercut me.
Each other roller clubs me on the head.
Not once of course, but again again
Clubbing, clubbing, clubbing,
Such stuffing as is in me goes limp.
My rescuers scream: ‘Keep your lips tight shut!’
As each wave crashes I writhe for consciousness –
A newborn baby pawing air;
My lungs spewing up bladders of salt water –
The rash smart sloggering brine.
Wrenching me they fling me shorewards –
These three fierce young men –
Until they lash me to a surfboard
And sail me in facedown the final furlong,
The final rumble strips of foam,
Racing the shoreline, beaching me,
Dumping me on wet sand bereft of ocean,
Raising me up by the armpits, hauling me.
On my hands and knees
In amber froth
I crawl the final metre.
On the keel of an upturned boat I sat down
And wept and shivered and stretched to vomit.
Sat retching there like a shredded parsnip,
The cowering genius of the shore.
Another Bondi casualty bent forlorn
Upon the tourist shingles
Of New South Wales.
When I am able to look up
My three midwives have gone
Whose names I do not know,
Only Brian. The two together
Were English boys. They waddled off
Into the anonymity of selflessness –
‘All part of the lifesaver’s ethos’
It is explained to me weeks later by
The North Bondi Surf Life-Saving Club.
Drowning and trying to wave
And not being seen
But being heard in the nick of time.
On the instructions of Brian,
With Gerard’s help,
I present myself
At the Bondi Medical Centre,
34 Campbell Parade.
A young Chinese doctor who cannot help
In spite of his instinctive etiquette
Smirking at my ludicrous appearance –
Trouserless in a green blazer –
Applies a stethoscope to my spine
And chimes: ‘Sir, you’re fine.’
Dr C. Chin.
35 Australian dollars.
Cash payment.
Gerard drives me to St Ignatius’s school
Where for half-an-hour
I play the serious fool
To waves of applause.
That night I do not dare to
sleep
But keep on the bedside light
Listening to my own breathing,
The possum in the wainscotting.
Instead of being a cold cod
On a slab in Sydney morgue
I am a warm fish in bed –
How can this be?
What sort of justice is this?
The crab of luck?
May I when I get home,
If I get home,
Chatter less cant
Especially when it comes
To life and death
Or to other people’s lives;
May I be
Less glib, less cocky;
May I be
Never righteous.
If I conclude
I ever have the right
To call Ayers Rock ‘Uluru’
May I be
Not smug about it –
Remember I’m only a white man.
May I take to heart
What the Aboriginal people
Of Brisbane, Alice Springs, Canberra,
Said and did not say to me.
May I never romanticize
The lives of Aboriginal people.
May I never write trite
Codswallop about indigenousness;
May I begin to listen.
May I decipher next time
Silences under gum trees:
‘Give him Bondi!’
Don’t think I will swim
Again in any sea.
Doubt if I will walk
Again by any sea.
But if I do –
If ever again I should have
The cheek to walk
The strand at Keel
In Achill Island –
To walk those three
Skies-in-the-sands miles
By those riding-stable half-doors
Of the Sheik of Inishturk,
With their herds of white horses
Leaning out at me fuming –
I will make that long walk
In nausea as well as awe:
The wings of the butterflies in my stomach
Weighed down by salt for evermore.
Next day I board a Boeing 747
From Sydney to Bangkok
Not caring – glancing over
My shoulder on the tarmac
At Mascot, not caring.
Not caring about anything.
Not about Egypt.
Not about Mayo.
Not about Ireland.
Not even longing for home.
Not even longing for home.
Praying once for all
I am gutted of ego;
That I have at last learnt
The necessity of being nothing,
The XYZ of being nobody.
In so far as I care
May I care nothing for myself,
Care everything for you –
Young mother of two
In the next seat;
A boy and a girl.
Thumbs in their mouths,
Helplessly asleep.
Back in Dublin
One person in whom
I can confide: Colm,
In that brusque,
Anti-sentimental,
Staccato-magnanimous,
Shooting-self-pity-in-the-eye
Tongue of his whispers
On the telephone at noon:
‘I swam in Rottnest
Off the coast of Perth,
Nearly lost my …
The sea is different in Australia, Paul,
A different pull.’
A year later
I cannot sleep
For thinking of Bondi;
Nightly re-enactment
Of being eaten alive
Under bottomless ceilings,
Pillows sprinting above me,
The bedroom window
Declining to open,
A schoolyard of faces
Pressing their noses
Against double-glazed glass
Waving at me
Hail or Farewell? –
I cannot know.
I am come into deep waters
Where the floods overflow me.
Ireland 2001
Where’s my bikini?
We’ll be late for Mass.
Ireland 2002
Do you ever take a holiday abroad?
No, we always go to America.
BERNARD O’DONOGHUE
(b.1945)
Casement on Banna
In this dawn waking, he is Oisin
Stretching down for the boulder
That will break his girth and plunge
Him into age; he’s Columcille
Waiting for foreign soil to leak
From his sandals and bring him death
In Ireland. He can’t be roused
By any fear of danger once he’s started
His own laying-out on this white sand.
Watching the usual landmarks in the sky,
He can no longer place them. Is that
Pegasus? Where’s Orion? Surer of
The wash and whisper from the Maharees,
He spots the oyster-catcher going off
To raise the alarm: an insane Orpheus
Craving a past he’d never had. His quest
Beached here that started in mutilation
And manacled rubber-harvesters.
Suddenly it has thrown him on the ground,
A man sick with his past, middled-aged,
Mad, more or less, who waits to be lifted
High, kicking in mid-air, gurgling
For breath, swaying, while Banna’s lonely sand
Drips for the last time from his shoe. So:
Was this the idea? The cure for every woe,
Injustice, brutishness? In this ecstasy
Larks rising everywhere, as he’d forgotten.
Ter Conatus
Sister and brother, nearly sixty years
They’d farmed together, never touching once.
Of late she had been coping with a pain
In her back, realization dawning slowly
That it grew differently from the warm ache
That resulted periodically
From heaving churns on to the milking-stand.
She wondered about the doctor. When,
Finally, she went, it was too late,
Even for chemotherapy. And still
She wouldn’t have got round to telling him,
Except that one night, watching television,
It got so bad she gasped, and struggled up,
Holding her waist. ‘D’you want a hand?’ he asked,
Taking a step towards her. ‘I can manage,’
She answered, feeling for the stairs.
Three times, like that, he tried to reach her.
But, being so little practised in such gestures,
Three times the hand fell back, and took its place,
Unmoving at his side. After the burial,
He let things take their course. The neighbours watched
In pity the rolled-up bales, standing
Silent in the fields, with the aftergrass
Growing into them, and wondered what he could
Be thinking of: which was that evening when,
Almost breaking with a lifetime of
Taking real things for shadows,
He might have embraced her with a brother’s arms.
TREVOR JOYCE
(b.1947)
all that is the case
take first a crux take any crossing say take noon or ten to five
from it subtract the gravity the drag the I am not in pain
the year which passes and today and once before
the one who is about to get here just before the give to me
the house which we shall see exactly three days
afterwards the which the how the very book thou gavest
as while about to fall I saw th
ee while about to fall I saw
then the she who came here yesterday who will approach
tomorrow that that red box see it still is empty and so too
the green that tomorrow I will go away again and stay
with numeral intensifier and frequentative
the feverish am I intermittent fevers hold me tell
what now is left say can you play do you thirst very very much
in darkness the some days the street is sky and nothing else
now then
this room is empty all
noise is the day everywhere
i haven’t stopped remembering
being unsure & the day is high
& warm outside to say there is nothing
happening here would be
to exaggerate it’s
a slack one today said the sun
to the glass let’s us just say
that time encompasses the walls
here (o flare of morning!)
that something is about
to happen who are you?
FRANK ORMSBY
(b.1947)
The Gate
I
There’s a gate in the middle of the field.
It leads into the middle of the field and out of it.
We lean on the gate in the hedge that leads into the field
and stare at the gate in the middle.
II
Travellers point to the gate in the middle of the field.
They approach and investigate. They invest the gate
with mysterious purpose. They want to interrogate
whoever put it there. They admire a gate
that has gatecrashed the middle of a field.
Let all gates have such freedom, they think, bar none.
III
We swing on the thought of a gate in the middle of a field,
Where it has no business, long after the gate has gone.
‘Remember the gate?’ we say and at night in our dreams
we head for the space in the middle.
We pass in file through the space in the middle of the field
and close, always, reverently, the gate behind us.
The Whooper Swan
When you croon your impression of a whooper swan,
at lunchtime, sotto voce, in Flanagan’s Bar,
the notes are beyond language, you are living that sound
by tidal shallows a hundred miles away
in a season part-voiceless until the swan’s return.
A moment’s silence. I imagine each dolorous yomp
as a bid for the true pitch, as though it defers
to a lough’s memory of winter or the last
death on an island, yet even in autumn lifts
a bronchial trump of resurrection.
The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Page 68
