for familiars to arrive,
folk seated in places
with their hats
on the seats
beside them;
and moments later
these strangers
on the seats beside them.
They fall into each other’s step,
take the same breath
as they cross the bridge
to the monument
and, laughing, make it home
at last; then somewhere
in the kitchen,
in the drenched garden,
comes the moment
when they realise
that the least
is known about the one
they love best —
we have been making each other up —
that look is made,
the look that
begs the question,
who are you
and who am I
and who are all the rest?
Reaching the Rockies
In the middle of a gale
with the peelers high
I found myself going back to Canada
in an old notebook I’d kept;
I turned the Apple on
and took a seat at the back of the plane
and was amazed again to find
that the steward serving food
was the spit of a gay dancer
I’d seen in Barcelona
break into tears
on the last night of the panto;
we’re airborne, we’re off;
to make the long journey
that leads back
to endless trivia:
Did Frank Brady meet
James Coyle the piper? And if they did,
did they get on? And so on …
while the air thins
over snow pitted with wind steps;
a lonesome white place,
sleeping in our consciousness,
as we sleep in it,
on a lake of white
these dark hoof-prints of wind
run, these thumb-prints,
toe-prints,
then the white turns windless.
The ghost animals stop.
All becomes the same above and below.
The line between blue and white sharpens.
And back to my right a Japanese couple,
with their eyes glued tight to the video screen
and their ears in earphones,
continue to play pontoon.
As she boxes the cards
he taps the table. She deals. He turns.
She deals again! Where am I?
I look out, look in.
In a blink I lost a hundred miles.
The ice cracks like weak tea
and civilization blinks on and off
like a bulb going.
The cracks make roads.
There’s the glint of sun on aluminium.
The snow lifts like the skin of an ass
shedding winter hair.
A world of squares begins.
Ice cool in buckets.
A river is thrown onto the land
like a scarf left after the night before.
The rings of the jet
are silent, round, oozing power —
then the whole thing disappears.
Canada is gone.
I jump back in fright.
The computer gives with a start.
For a minute I sit suspended
high in the chilled air
till I realise the electricity
has given, a transformer is down somewhere,
and I’m left in crackling space
alone, in darkness —
just as we reached the Rockies
with nothing saved
and whatever happened after
never to come again.
Somerset Maugham on Bass with The Harp Jazz Band in Enniskillen
for Roddy
The other night I came across
Somerset Maugham
playing his heart out
on double-bass and mouth organ
along with Spencer Tracy on piano
and a few other dudes
in a version of ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’
in Enniskillen.
Somerset Maugham was huge and lived-in
and kept his eye on the bar;
Spencer on the other hand
kept time with his chin —
What a din! What a do!
Jazz in Orange Halls.
Jazz down The Falls where old pros turn
into old film stars,
then later, going home, I think of
this Somerset Maugham
lying down in his room
just before dawn
somewhere off the Crumlin Road
where old LPs line the walls.
He sleeps among the greats
and wakes hearing a tune
he fell asleep playing
in a small café
in the South of France, yes,
in Marseilles perhaps.
He is playing a tune for the cast of Casablanca
who just dropped in
He’s away now with ‘A kiss is just a kiss’;
‘A smile is just a smile’,
he sings to the pimps.
Henry Fonda is on his feet.
Duke Ellington steps
out of the shadows
to applaud Maugham on mouth organ,
and the plane carrying the Glenn Miller Band
has not yet left the ground.
Father and Son
for Phil Lawlor
At any given moment of the day
my eye will light
on the plaster cast
of Joseph and Jesus
as they sun themselves
on the cluttered sill,
sometimes with their back to all
that’s out there,
and other times facing towards —
snug in their robes —
the wine skies
and teeming rain.
He has him in the crook of his arm,
the hollow father,
and the child’s fixed gaze
never wavers
from a point on Raughley
where the blowhole
is. Out of pagan China or Korea
they came
and they came in thousands,
this porcelain pair,
to look down from kitchen walls
in farthest Cracow,
to light up
when the driver strikes the brake
of taxis in Quito.
They are there
in the dark nooks of chapels
in Crete. With all the art about
you’d wonder how they persist
in being lovely.
The carpenter looks out
on the flooded fields —
fences of storm-tossed
fertilizer bags,
black plastic, nappies —
with the benign eye
of a man who has seen worse.
The red-haired child
is awake before anyone
else in the house —
up into his father’s arm with him.
Last thing at night
the pair are there,
closer, somehow content,
with the father’s skirt
hitched up,
and the hollow son smaller,
shadowed by the wide black
of all that is beyond
the reflecting glass.
They are watching
for the return
of the woman who’s away
in Sligo town.
May she come soon,
that I do not resort to prayer!
I’ll put them on the step outside
to guide her home.
First Thi
ng
First thing in the morning
I saw a stoat
sloping along the turf.
Another member
of the extended family!
One morning soon
I’ll glance out
and find an elephant in the surf
looking off into the middle distance,
and it’ll only be a matter of time
before I’ve trained him
to lift stones
from the soft belly
of the wet flowing seaweed,
the yellow pods of sea-corn.
After him will come
tigers, ostriches, elks,
and we will make wonderful fossils,
all of us, woman,
cats, dogs, tern,
sculpted in time
beneath a maidenhead fern.
About the Author
Dermot Healy was born in Finea, County Westmeath, in 1947. His books include Banished Misfortune (stories), Fighting with Shadows, A Goat’s Song, Sudden Times and Long Time, No See (novels), and The Bend for Home (memoir).
The Gallery Press has also published the following collections of poems: The Ballyconnell Colours, What the Hammer and A Fool’s Errand. Dermot Healy lived in Ballyconnell, County Sligo, until his sudden death, aged 66, in 2014.
Also by Dermot Healy
in print editions
from The Gallery Press
The Ballyconnell Colours (Poems)
A Fool’s Errand (Poems)
Copyright
The Reed Bed
was first published
simultaneously in paperback
and in a clothbound edition
on 9 November 2001.
The Gallery Press
Loughcrew
Oldcastle
County Meath
Ireland
www.gallerypress.com
All rights reserved. For permission
to reprint or broadcast these poems,
write to The Gallery Press.
© Dermot Healy 2010
ePub ISBN 978–1–85235–6262
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
The Reed Bed receives financial
assistance from The Arts Council