The Other Poet drives a black Mercedes, knows historians and sea-swimmers, and remarks that from Portumna on, the land goes back in time, closes in, grows dark and stays quiet.
I am the second poet, sipping water, hoping that our conversation won’t die a death from my shyness. I can see the landscape gnarl itself into dark green and, whirring down my window, I smell rank, sweet ditchwater. House windows flash the black shine of shadow and sun. I wonder if I shall spot anyone from another century. There are farming sheds still standing from the seventeen-hundreds.
Cows turn their big faces, and I am afraid of how life goes on until we die. All those dead tucked into the ground as the ancient Mercedes purrs by.
‘The Normans are coming soon,’ the Other Poet announces as we head towards Thomastown.
The land grows bright green in the Norman fields of the south-east, and Thomastown is seventeen-centuries-old and older, as is Grennan, a ‘Sunny Place’ in which the Other Poet’s black Mercedes parks.
His friend, the artist, lives here.
The artist’s house is pale blue and cut-in-two. One half is down and the other half up, where the artist’s ex-wife lives. And it overlooks the small, in-between courtyard full of rusting iron, bicycles, an old rowing boat, and a pear and an apple tree.
He insists he comes from Vikings. No, from the knobbled dark bog, the Other Poet says.
The artist shows me how to pluck a pear from its branch, my hand under its belly; once ripe, it will drop into my palm. I bite into it. The flesh is hardly soft, yet sweet.
Mind the dog dirt, the artist warns me.
There is a knocking on the window of his ex-wife’s half of the house. It opens and a blonde woman sticks her head out. You’ll get a stomach-ache and a bug from that pear!
It’s fine, the artist yells up at her.
When she’s throwing up she’ll have you to thank. Did he offer you tea or coffee?
He did, yes thank you.
Did he offer you anything else?
No, not a thing, the Other Poet says.
Well, come up here and I’ll offer you something.
Can I come up too? The artist says.
This time, yes.
Her kitchen-sitting room is painted mustard yellow with a cherry-red AGA and cherry-red cushions strewn across a Chinese golden-coloured sofa and chairs. Three cats spread themselves on the sofa, black, white and brindle. The dogs amble in and settle on the sitting room carpet. There are framed landscape paintings on the walls.
Hers and mine, the artist remarks.
Mine, she says. Mostly mine.
She sets out teacups, saucers and milk in a jug. Do you like marmalade cake?
Lovely, the Other Poet says.
Poets, the artist introduces the Other Poet and me to his ex-wife.
Well, I didn’t think you were his usual type of visitors. Mad, streeling banshees, the women and their badly dressed feral men.
They’re headed to Wexford to read at a festival.
How lovely for them. You’ll enjoy yourselves, won’t you?
Thank you, I say. We will.
What made you stop here?
He’s my friend isn’t he, the artist says as he folds over a slice of cake, then pops it into his mouth.
Don’t dare sprinkle any crumbs on the floor for the dogs, you.
Hasn’t crossed my mind at all.
It’s a nice set-up you have here, the Other Poet says. Great-looking AGA.
She did well out of me, the artist says.
We both did well out of each other. I gave you love and two children.
I taught you art.
You did not. I knew it already. I just needed some techniques.
The marmalade cake is delicious, I say.
The Other Poet winks at me. It is. You’re right.
The artist’s ex-wife insists on giving me a posy of Goat’s Willow, from a large shrub near their gate. She strokes its silky catkins.
It’s for sadness or mourning. But the Druids called it ‘sunshine fire’ because the male catkins turn golden when they are ripe.
We say goodbye and, while the Other Poet drives the Mercedes, the dark sunlight lies over the land with its last warmth, recycled from all those centuries ago, and the world is miasma and all the others of us are still here.
*
There are little thatched cottages in Kilmore Quay village but there isn’t enough daylight to see the full spread of sea. A seafood fishing restaurant is for sale. A great place for fish, the Other Poet tells me, then steers his Mercedes towards our destination. We are late and all the food is gone, except perhaps there might be a basket of chips if the catering staff are roused from their coffees or whiskey and wine. The Other Poet is friends with a few mountaineers and sea-swimmers, who sit with us and agree that these days the sea is changing, and the mountains are abused. No one wants to just feel the world about them, a mountaineer says. To stand alone and feel what every other animal or living plant feels.
A basket of chips is placed in front of us all, straggly and thin, threaded through crispy onion rings, and a sea-swimmer douses his portion in salt. I suppose he would, being from the sea. He laughs at me watching and asks if I have ever dived down, no air tanks, to the bottom of the ocean. I answer no, but I can imagine it. She’s good with words, the Other Poet announces. So, tell me how it goes, the sea-swimmer says. Here out from Kilmore Quay.
I’d be well used to it, I say. I’d go out beyond the Saltee Islands waters, beyond the resting seals and puffins almost to open sea, sit on the edge of my boat, gather the air into my lungs, then dive. I can hold my air for five minutes, so I presume for here it is long enough for me to reach the bottom of the sea or as close as possible. I enter the water and my lungs drive me down while my centre of gravity turns heavy as a cannonball. The water rushes through my ears, pounding on my long burst eardrums, burst intentionally for balance and in order to dive five minutes and, perhaps one day, longer. The water is a darker blue-green and some diving seals move by me, silent and flowing and lower still, where the sunlight still reaches, where their shadows resemble those mermaids from the rhapsodies of old-time sailors.
I tread water rather than touch the bottom of the sea because I am experiencing a different world and I dive for nothing more. Layers of warmth and cold flow beneath my arms, my ears, into my hair. My scalp prickles at the sight of Ling fish and there is coalfish too. I wonder if a blue shark may appear. Further beneath my feet, the sea floor is the graveyard of a thousand ships, down to sixteen fathoms or more they lie hollowed out, bereft of the humans who used to live in them atop the waves.
My legs hover above this graveyard and a cold burning begins in my lungs. I motion upwards, slowly dissolving the cannonball gravity of my lower belly, mindful of the air releasing through my nostrils, the seawater pressing my face flat against its bone. There is always a fear of too fast and I will break the water, maddened with pain from my burst eardrums. Pressurised blood will jettison from my eyes; my gums and my lungs will rupture against my heart.
*
The Other Poet pours me a little red wine to best reimburse my blood; he laughs as does everyone else and talk turns to the Other Poet’s Mercedes. I let the talk rattle over my head, while I wonder at the vast room before me, brimful of poets and writers chewing chips and swallowing wine, laughing, climbing the stairs to the festival’s reading room and back down again. The Other Poet talks about his love for his Mercedes. Black is the best colour for her and she’s well over fifty years old. She drove down these roads to here as if she always knew them, drove past every bit of history along the way. Imagine, she was made when I was about twenty in London, before the eighties.
I think of the black Mercedes pristine in somebody’s sunshining day, in a street in London, perhaps Plaistow or East Ham, somewhere seedy so her shine would make people stare. Some last remnants of the Kray’s world may have glanced at her and thought not bad by half, but have had better.
*
I once stepped into a pub near Plaistow that had been frequented by the Krays long ago in the sixties. I was trying to be a poet and kept a notebook and pen. There weren’t any black Mercedes to be seen, mostly well-used ordinary cars, just as well-used as the people in that pub I stepped into out of the sunshine and it was quiet there, a dark, shadowed gangsters’ set piece.
The pub lady looked at me Yes, love?
A cup of tea, please.
My accent caught her. She raised an eyebrow and switched on a nearby kettle kept especially for hot whiskeys she told me, not many cups of tea here. I drank my tea at the bar counter, and I tried to write a poem but my tears got in my way. I was crying for no reason, but I was crying for all the lost things I could not name.
The pub lady came over and put her hand over mine.
Go home, love. Go on now and be safe.
*
The Other Poet and I climb the staircase to the festival’s reading hall while the sea-swimmers and mountaineers follow, grasping their own books. The Other Poet reads first. A dark story of return, an image in my mind of a pair of siblings’ history stretching back in time over years upon years, an old battle with Unc, the uncle, culminating in violence and in peace.
I read my story about a Jewish artist whose art I have loved for years. I entered her head, her body and her painted life; like the way I dived down into the sea, down and hovered there above the shipwrecks, I hovered my fingers within Charlotte Salomon’s own fingers, and I asked her, how can you create when you know death is coming? She replies, it is either do something wildly crazy or kill myself.
But why did you leave her there, a woman in the audience asks me? And I try to reply that in real life she was murdered; in real life she was gassed in Auschwitz. The woman presses my hands and repeats, Why did you leave her there?
*
The Other Poet and I return to the hotel, which is quiet except for a cleaner pushing a floor polishing machine. It whirrs and turns and the cleaner glances, sees only strange people staring at him, nods, then continues on his way. The Other Poet and I say good night. He takes the lift and I take the stairs.
I make tea in my room and eat all three packets of complimentary biscuits while sitting on the bed, rubbing my bare feet into the carpet. I begin to wonder at how we all live in this world until we finally die, and at all the dead lying in the ground beneath us, yet I see them still wandering in and out of those seventeenth-century sheds, watching us purr by in the Other Poet’s black Mercedes.
I remember the Artist’s pear in my palm, the bottom heaviness of it sitting there, and my fingers reaching up to stroke its neck, while the Artist’s dogs snuffled at my legs, licked my knees and pressed their fur against my legs as I bit into the pear.
My feet dig into the hotel room’s carpet, and I see black clay dirt squeeze upwards through my toes, stuck with hay husk. The clay embraces my heels and ankles, so cold that the ache in my head is comforted.
*
The Other Poet approaches my breakfast table to say farewell. He and his mountaineer friends are driving to the Blackstairs Mountains, on the border of Carlow and Wexford. They will hike there for a while, look over the land, and feast their heads with memories for poems.
There are stewed pears for breakfast sprinkled with star anise. I write in my notebook as the room begins to fill with people and their eating, until my taxi to Wexford train station arrives.
I think of the black Mercedes approaching the Blackstairs Mountains and, as the taxi enters Wexford, and before I step into the train station, I place about me my aura of don’t touch me or you die.
*
You see Vikings and Normans here amongst the present-day Irish of many colours, and one of them sits opposite me in the train. He glugs water from his special drinking flask, his yellow fingers scissor fast against each other. He says he needs a cigarette. He’s conscious that might be disturbing for me, but it is psychological for him. Sometimes he believes it is driving him mad. He yearns to no longer smell of nicotine smoke.
My aura of don’t touch me or you die does not work on a train with a talkative person. He is from a little place in Kiruna, high up near the Arctic Circle. Have I ever been to Sweden?
Yes, Stockholm.
What did you do there?
Walked around. I liked the swing seats put out for the public on the harbour. When did you give up cigarettes?
Yesterday, after my wife left me.
Is she Irish?
French. What are you reading?
C.S. Lewis.
I don’t read much. I don’t think much, according to my wife. I smoke. The book?
It’s about how we put on faces for the world.
What is your face?
The one I have is always the one I am.
You are lying.
I suppose I am, but I am trying to have the one face. What’s your face?
It’s gone with my wife.
You have a big face with red hair. Big eyebrows.
It is swollen because I cried so much. Do you like men who cry?
I don’t know much about men who cry, but I don’t think I’d mind it.
Where are you going?
Galway. You?
Dublin Airport. I am going home, back home to Kiruna. It’s Sami land. You’ve heard of the Sami people? Lapland?
Yes. Are you one?
No. I told my wife I was. She wanted me to bring her back there. She said I refused to share her with my family and that is why she was leaving me.
She might have been happier if you lived in Paris rather than Wexford in Ireland.
She is from Brittany. Navarre. She is not a bit Parisian. She has long fingers and is a linguistics professor. I am a plumber and a sculptor. I sculpt from wood and sometimes stone. I travelled to Wexford because my ancestors maybe arrived there once and my father had died and the house was empty and I loved my father. So… I left. Now I am going back.
You?
I am a poet. I am going back to Galway after reading my work at a festival. Another Poet in a black Mercedes gave me a lift to there.
Mercedes?
A big, lovely car.
I prefer Audi.
Audis are nice.
He leans his big face forward. I like your cheekbones.
Thank you.
This is you, yes? I have drawn you while you were speaking.
Oh yes, that’s me. That’s good!
Wood, yes? Because when someone holds your face, it will be warm in their hands. I will send it to you.
Thank you.
*
The Viking turned to the scenery moving past our train window.
Perhaps you will make up with her, I say.
His right eye glances at me. No. Then he resumes his stare at the window view.
What is home in Kiruna?
An empty house. Frozen pipes, probably.
Will you be happy to be back?
No, but I will be back. I will fix the house, the pipes. I will visit one or two neighbours. I will visit my father’s grave. I will do several things.
What about your mother?
I don’t know her. She left when I was young. Two months of twenty-four-hour daylight were not enough for her.
I’m sorry.
He turns back from the window. A poet?
I am.
A poetess?
I like that, thank you.
Make a poem about me. Send it to me after I send you your face.
I will.
I’m going to sleep now.
He sleeps right to the end as the train pulls into Heuston station, and I have to reach forward to shake his yellow fingers. He stretches, yawns, peers at the queue of people in the aisle, anxious to disembark, then smiles at me.
We wait until the aisle is clear and he helps me with my suitcase, then onto the platform where we walk towards the ticket machines. Pigeons fly over our heads, people jostle, kids watch their phones and nothing else. He has to catch the airport bus and we exchange emails. We look and smile at each other.
My name is Aero. Yours?
I tell him mine.
We shake hands first, then he grasps my elbows, searches my face, then lets me go.
For the slight lines on your forehead, he says. I need to memorise them. Goodbye.
Goodbye Aero.
*
I am solitary now in Heuston Station. The pigeons fly, waddle and peck at sandwich crumbs on the ground. I walk and wait for the Galway train to be announced. Make me a poem, he said and I am thinking of all his red hair, his red eyebrows and his yellow fingers. A Viking, I thought of him in the beginning and now I see him reach his house in Kiruna, see him fix the frozen pipes, walk over snow to visit his neighbours and then, sitting down to make my face out of wood.
The Galway train is announced.
