Derek Mahon

I lie and imagine a first light gleam in the bay
After one more night of erosion and nearer the grave,
Then stand and gaze from the window at break of day
As a shearwater skims the ridge of an incoming wave;
...

They said I got away in a boat
And humbled me at the inquiry. I tell you
I sank as far that night as any
Hero. As I sat shivering on the dark water
...

(for James Simmons)
1

I wake in a dark flat
To the soft roar of the world.
...

There is an old
statue in the courtyard
that weeps, like Niobe, its sorrow in stone.
...

What night-rule now about this haunted grove?
The spirits have dispersed, the woods
faded to grey from midnight blue
...

Surely you paused at this roadside oasis
In your nomadic youth, and saw the mound
Of never-used cement, the curious faces,
...

(for Seamus Heaney)
First time out
I was a torc of gold
And wept tears of the sun.
...

Nurses and nuns —
their sails whiter than those
of the yachts in the bay, they come and go
...

The bright drop quivering on a thorn
in the rich silence after rain,
lute music in the orchard aisles,
...

(after Saba)

Anyone watching you in the water would think: ‘A siren!'
Winner in the women's swimming event, you seem
strange on the screen of my inglorious life.
...

Walking among my own this windy morning
In a tide of sunlight between shower and shower,
I resume my old conspiracy with the wet
...

A heron-like species, rare visitors, most recent records
referring to winter months . . . very active at dusk.
—Guide to Irish Birds
A sobering thought, the idea of you stretched there,
bittern, under a dark sky, your exposed bones
yellow too in a ditch among cold stones,
ice glittering everywhere on bog and river,
the whole unfortunate country frozen over
and your voice stilled by enforced sobriety —
a thought more wrenching than the fall of Troy
because more intimate; for we'd hear your shout
of delight from a pale patch of watery sunlight
out on the mud there as you took your first
drink of the day and now, destroyed by thirst,
you lie in brambles while the rats rotate.
I'd've broken the ice for you, given an inkling;
now, had I known it, we might both be drinking
and singing too; for ours is the same story.
Others have perished — heron, blackbird, thrushes —
and lie shivering like you under whin-bushes;
but I mourn only the bittern, withdrawn and solitary,
who used to carouse alone among the rushes
and sleep rough in the star-glimmering bog-drain.
It used to be, with characters like us,
they'd let us wander the roads in wind and rain
or lock us up and throw away the key —
but now they have a cure for these psychoses
as indeed they do for most social diseases
and, rich at last, we can forget our pain.
She says I'm done for if I drink again;
so now, relieved of dangerous stimuli,
as peace with my plastic bottle of H2O
and the slack strings of insouciance, I sit
with bronze Kavanagh on his canal-bank seat
not in ‘the tremendous silence of mid-July'
but the fast bright zing of a winter afternoon
dizzy with head-set, flash-bulb and digifone,
to learn the tao he once claimed as his own
and share with him the moor-hen and the swan,
the thoughtless lyric of a cloud in the sky
and the play of light and shadow on the slow
commemorative waters; relax, go with the flow.
...

A roof over my head, protected from the rain,
I'm reading, pilgrim father, your letters to your son
and wondering if, unlike you, I should­ head for home.
...

No wise man ever wished to be younger.
— Swift
1

Down the long library each marble bust
...

(for Philip Haas)
The television set hung
in its wire-net cage,
protected from the flung
...

The only reality is the perpetual flow of vital energy.
—Montale
Spindrift, crustacean patience
and a gust of ozone,
...

I dive and rise in an explosion of spindrift
and drift to a turtle-faced inflatable raft -
evening, Cyclades, one cloud in the azure,
a brain-scan light-show swarming on blue tiles,
...

If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Hail, floppy-slippered bear of St. Mark's Place!
I seem to glimpse your cheesy, limestone face
...

(for Harry Clifton)

A whole night-sky that serves as a paperweight,
this azure block blown in from the universe
...

Even now there are places where a thought might grow —
Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
To a slow clock of condensation,
An echo trapped for ever, and a flutte
...