#derekmahon

by Derek Mahon

If friendship has a colour, for me it is the mellow honeyed amber glow permeating every snug crack and cranny inside Dublin’s Palace Bar, glancing discretely off each polished hardwood counter, mirror frame and high stool, suffusing the backroom round tables and red weathered leather chairs, the light of illumination and memory reflected in every looking glass, stained glass whiskey advert and…

I have abandoned the dream kitchens for a low fire and a prescriptive literature of the spirit; a storm snores on the desolate sea. The nearest shop is four miles away – when I walk there through the shambles of the morning for tea and firelighters the mountain paces me in a snow-lit silence. My days are spent in conversation with deer and blackbirds; at night fox and badger gather at my door. I have stood for hours watching a salmon doze in the tea-gold dark, for months listening to the sob story of a stone in the road, the best, most monotonous sob story I have ever heard. I am an expert on frost crystals and the silence of crickets, a confidant of the stinking shore, the stars in the mud – there is an immanence in these things which drives me, despite my scepticism, almost to the point of speech, like the sunlight cleaving the lake mist at morning or when tepid water runs cold at last from the tap. I have been working for years on a four-line poem about the life of a leaf; I think it might come out right this winter.

This One’s For You, Michele

Small world. Well, my corner of it these days. Which is what I was thinking about a little while ago, when I took the photograph that you see below. I took it from where I was stretched out, lazy and languid, on the big, cheerfully orange couch in our kitchen-dining room. My kitchen world … This photograph actually captures so much of how my world is these days. Lily was snuggled up against…

Somewhere beyond the scorched gable end and the burnt-out buses    there is a poet indulging        his wretched rage for order- or not as the case may be; for his        is a dying art,    an eddy of semantic scruples        in an unstructurable sea.

       He is far from his people, and the fitful glare of his high window is as        nothing to our scattered glass.

His posture is grandiloquent and deprecating, like this,        his diet ashes, his talk of justice and his mother        the rhetorical device    of an etiolated emperor- Nero is you prefer, no mother there.

   '...and this in the face of love,    death, and the wages of the poor...'

If he is silent, it is the silence of enforced humility;    if anxious to be heard, it is the anxiety        of a last word when the drums start;       for his is a dying art.