Note to Reader
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Praise for The Reed Bed
Healy’s verse shows the range his writing is capable of, and the risks he is prepared to take. As with the narrative journeys of his novels and memoirs, his poetry is not content with just one epiphany. It must know what happens after joy and after revelation, driven by a brave necessity which strives to be thrilled again and to know what comes next.
These poems are remarkable for their searing sincerity and for the humanely frank intelligence with which they try to comprehend the possibilities of people, their fears and insecurities, their paranoia and inarticulacy, and finally their deaths. All this is perceived from the potentially terrifying and opaque distance from reality which characterizes Healy’s world, in which moments of clarity often precede a vertiginous fall towards a state of understanding which is overwhelming.
— Colin Graham, The Irish Times
Generally favouring a brief line and short stanzas, Healy creates a mood of regret and grief that is modified by the harshness of nature into a tough stoicism. There is no self-pity here in the recollection of severed relationships or evocations of loneliness, rather there is a realization that life is best faced by staring into the terrifying infinite spaces that Pascal spoke of. A metaphysical froideur is never far away in Healy, even in the most domestic of his topics.
— Rory Brennan, Books Ireland
Gallery Books
Editor: Peter Fallon
THE REED BED
THE REED BED
Dermot Healy
Contents
Front Cover
Note to Reader
Praise for The Reed Bed
Editor’s Info Page
Title Page
A Ball of Starlings
When They Want to Know What We Were Like
The Purging
All the Meteors
I Catch Sight of Them as I Often Do
The Longing
Away with the Birds
Just Then
The Hallway
The Blackbird
Tongs
When We Talk of What’s Out There
Those Days
The Reed Bed
Only Just
The Task
Chalkey’s Grave
Who is That?
A Warning
Sunday, 16 August 1998
Alas
The West End
The Words
A Sober Night with Stars
Plants, Heavy with Berry
The Strange Impasse
The Whispering Shells
Walls
The Wall I Built
The Sky Road
What Happened at Noon?
A Breeze
The Cat
Larkin’s Room in a Storm
One Minute with Eileen
Wonderers
Reaching the Rockies
Somerset Maugham on Bass with The Harp Jazz Band in Enniskillen
Father and Son
First Thing
About the Author
Also by Dermot Healy
Copyright
Back Cover
THE REED BED
A Ball of Starlings
for Seamus Colreavy
As evening falls
over the bulrushes
parties of starlings
arrive in flurries
to join the other shape-makers
at the alt. The swarm blows
high, dives out of sight
in a beautiful aside,
till there’s scarce a trace
of a bird —
then a set of arched wings appears,
then another,
hundreds turn
as one,
and suddenly over the lough
a whispering ball of starlings
rises into
the blue night
like a shoal of sardines
gambolling underwater
and, changing shape,
the birds
rise in the vast dark
like hayseed
till the puff-ball
explodes
and the birds
suddenly flip
again into nothingness:
and when the roost reappears out of the deep
in a great teeming net
the din grows intense
as they build
these last perfect
arcs, these ghostly
gall-bows,
before making
one final sweep
that ends
in a ticking globe
above the reeds;
then, chattering, the starlings spill
across the black fields.
When They Want to Know What We Were Like
When they want to know what we were like
they will search for the barriers we raised
against the wind. Aggression and erosion will place us
exactly. The way our battery walls faced
will tell them the direction
of the worst storms. A grave will be a windfall
for the weathermen. Our skeletons
will have a tilt to the spine
on account of walking head-down,
our lungs be huge from shouting in gales.
And everything they find will have been
somewhere else to start with.
How far have the cereals been blown
from the field in which they were sown?
And what of the moments of calm
that have been scattered over the wide acres?
The Purging
The sea would rot
if it didn’t rise.
All that spring cleaning!
All that washing away,
night and day,
day and night,
of what the rivers carried
down from the mountains.
And then at last
the drying. The lying still.
The crackle of a sheet.
The whispering water.
The towelling breeze.
See at the bar
after the purging
the new man
water-mirrored
with the moon in his lap.
All the Meteors
Yesterday there were
things to be done.
Now, nothing.
It closes in.
All the meteors
have landed.
Six swans cruise
through the dark
and though I can sense
their cold-webbed feet,
the ruffled water
of the dark flood,
the whole thing is a blur.
I’m pinned
down here in a wind
from the south
among the wooden poor
of Ecuador,
the hee-hawing ass,
a dog,
a limping cat,
and whatever in the wide world
awaits me
after that.
I Catch Sight of Them as I Often Do
I catch sight of them as I often do
by chance, these stars,
these settlements of light,
and looking up last thing last night
I realised that just as their light
is only now reaching us, long after
they have g
one out of existence,
where I now stand others have looked up
that are long gone.
They too
have gone out of existence,
these sea-folk who stored stars
in their heads for direction
and prayer;
the light from the stars
that reached them reaches me,
their existence shines down on my head
though they are long dead.
The light they saw then
is the light I see now,
and the light they saw then came from others
further back, looking up, like them,
and so on … the light of our lives
shining down on some other
who by chance looked up
before turning in for the night.
The Longing
The wide skirt of damp rock
on the giving tide.
Myself uneasy at the mirror.
I fight the longing.
This sick longing
enters me.
I have been amiss.
I better stop out of town.
All these fragments
weigh me down.
I do not want to go on
because you will not
be with me.
Above our heads,
above our heads,
the lightning
is searching the dark
for one perfect opening.
Away with the Birds
Just before a long journey
I get so homesick
that I can hardly talk,
or think, or eat,
all those half-heard notes
of transience
gather, the sough
and regret,
till this, I think with a start,
may be forever.
I’m so glued to this place
I get light in the head
at the thought of being elsewhere.
This time Hartnett
won’t be behind me
on the plane
to spray water on.
The lungs will be gripped
by the ribs like claws.
A gin or two in the air
won’t make up for the small habits
of every day. I’m finished.
Life will go awry.
And then there’s the faces
of people saying goodbye.
Do they not see the fate
ordained for you?
The air-conditioners
going up into a whine
in some hotel where
last night’s lovers are still at it
salaciously in your bed.
In a panic I launch
into something that will never
get finished, begin something
better left unsaid.
In the other room
you’re putting away
trousers, shirts,
blouses, lipstick,
while in here
I’m pretending to work
the words when, in fact,
I’m away with the birds,
already sitting
out on the runway
at Kuala Lumpur
with a crossword
I began in Strandhill
and now half-way
round the world
I’m getting nowhere
wondering why I’m there
while I could be here,
and wondering why,
while I’m here,
I’m there already
by the southern ocean
beginning another round
of superstitions
to keep me going
and fill the distances between
the place I’m in
and the place I’m not,
not like in the old days
when I couldn’t wait
to enter
the vast strangeness —
before first light
already on the road,
the thumb up,
the world before me.
Just Then
Just then I saw the earth below
with such clarity
that I forgot
my station in life.
Not a word about mortality.
No. Just these beings
generous to a fault
adding to existence,
then taking off
with their bag of tricks
and sores and complaints
and works and loves,
ponies, asses, dogs,
and that death rattle
which comes from the core
to leapfrog
into the memory of those
who will remember
them. With the passage
of time it’s harder to get a mention
unless you’re invented
again. Nothing doing
in the onion bed
or under the bonnet of the car.
Nothing stirring among
the blue bottles of Milk of Magnesia
for the bouts of indigestion.
The plastic shoes fill
with rainwater. The new crowd
are sitting in your chairs.
Things go on the same.
But there’s hope —
at a wedding party
an old fogey — myself —
breaks out in tears
at the mention of your name.
The Hallway
Sometimes I find myself back in the bed I grew up in
floating there in the fever of adolesence
or if I’m not lying in that long bed
by Burke’s whitewashed shed
more often than not I am down in the hallway by the hall-stand
where something is after happening.
It’s unnerving to be so intensely young again.
Now youth is a nightmare from which I can’t awake.
I’m back standing at the bottom of the stairs
at the half-glassed doorway onto the street
and outside the town beats like a cymbal.
I’m there most nights on the tiles,
high tide or low tide, or wherever I am
I’m back in the hall by the hall-stand
where the coats hang from question marks.
I am neither shadow nor substance.
It is not where you would expect to find yourself
after some years on the earth.
The house is dark and silent.
The door has just closed behind me or soon will open.
What darkness! What silence!
The Blackbird
I had great plans for the blackbird that came to live with us.
I’d camp out under his bush to catch his first stirrings, the first shout of ‘I’m alive’ to her,
‘Is there anybird else out there?
I’m alive, listen …’
Then, as he shunted through his tunes, I below would hear him ask
his mate what she would like to hear, Would she like to hear the one I learned from my father,
and he from his?,
that dawn spurt
of delicious notes about jealousy, dreams. Do hear me, mate? Do you hear me, mate?
I mean it, Forgive me, Fasten the bow, Loose the sail, Eat the fruit, Tip the scales, Accept the shock,
and all that questioning
of the resolute heavens,
you heart, scald-lady, Do you mind, Do you mind how we were separated in November
by somebird, by somebird, How the wind cleaves, Him getting wilder in his confessions,
then the sudden silence,
and the quiet shame.
In my bed at five, I heard him step out of his nest and charge his trilling bill with joy.
At sadness, heard him pluck, scold, stop, teeter, sway, call in
the animals at sunset
whistle for the fun of it,
and the forgetfulness.
He’s on the gate with a stiffening tail-feather tilted like a toothpick looking east.
He’s gone, I think. The blackbird’s gone, I say. Then, next thing, I hear a song must be his.
There she is scuttling,
yellow-beaked, into the shadows.
The whistling blackbird, first to stop in this bare place, has planted trees and rose hedgerows.
She’s set seeds. He’s tilled, trimmed, brought in a harvest of treesong from way inland.
He lifts the stonechat’s heart.
He silences whitearse
when londubh assails the coming dark with all the words we have ever heard said in anger,
in love, he loves the quick of it timing every last refrain as the sun is leaving Jimmy’s window
When the bird stops
Suddenly. Suddenly.
For days I listened but it was too late. They’re gone, I’ll never camp out below their song.
I lost my chance. I had a river at the bottom of my garden. I had a lake, a pool.
I had a high tree, I had the warmth of a high tree,