(From ‘Talbot Road’)
That was fifteen years ago. Tony is dead, the block where I lived has been torn down. The mind is an impermanent place, isn’t it, but it looks to permanence. The street has opened and opened up into no character at all. Last night I dreamt of it as it might have been, the pavement by the church railings was wet with spring rain, it was night, the streetlamps’ light rendered it into an exquisite etching. Sentimental postcard of a dream, of a moment between race-riots!
But I do clearly remember my last week, when every detail brightened with meaning. A boy was staying with (I would think) his grandmother in the house opposite. He was in his teens, from the country perhaps. Every evening of that week he sat in his white shirt at the window – a Gothic arch of reduced proportion – leaning on his arms, gazing down as if intently making out characters from a live language he was still learning, not a smile cracking his pink cheeks. Gazing down at the human traffic, of all nations, the just and the unjust, who were they, where were they going, that fine public flow at the edge of which he waited, poised, detached in wonder and in no hurry before he got ready one day to climb down into its live current.
While we’re on the subject of poetry, here is a little video of me reading an extract from Derek Mahon’s ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’.
