Vesuvius blows its stack

When he spoke in his 60s of Dungarvan's Ormonde Cinema

he saw through the radiant eyes of an eight year old boy.

In the spiral of his memory Last Days of Pompeii summered on,

a Steve Reeves muscle-bulger swords-and-sandal peplum flick,

the mighty spectacle of a bacchanalian city getting pumiced by God.

The returned-home Roman legionnaire Glaucus saves the Christians before Pompeii turns to ash.

We’d agreed to watch his flick at the first night of our movie club.

See! The yawning jaws of the flesh-ripping alligator death pit!

See! The awesome eruption of Mt. Vesuvius as it avalanches down into a boiling inferno!

See! The martyred Christians thrown to the gaping fangs of crazed lions!

Pompeii! City of the pagan hordes, of revels and orgies, of spectacle and splendour,

the city that lived in sin and died in flame. Stuck in the drainpipe of his memory.

We climbed the fiery summit in a wash of Eastmancolour Supertotalscope.

He told us that Sergio Leone not Mario Bonnard was the true director of the movie.

We asked if this was his first encounter with the good, the bad and the ugly.

There is no doubt Mr Universe Steve Reeves was a sthenic hunk in a skirt and a sword,

especially when he grabbed the heroine off her runaway chariot and tossed her on his horse’s back.

He told us that Reeves had ripped his shoulder out for real when he’d hit a tree.

The movie arrived at the most exciting years-waited scene he wanted us to see.

Glaucus is thrown into a hidden pit of water and fights an alligator to the death. 

The hero unjaws the alligator in a far-too-short few-seconds battle where he has to move

a model from side to side to make it look like it's not a bendy flip-flop piece of rubber.

I saw it dawn on disenchanted him that this feeble wiggling scene was the image of heroic
bare-handed combat that had blazed for nearly sixty years at the centre of his memory map.

Now, having got the people out of town, Glaucus is down at the harbour.

The sea is on fire, so Glaucus leaps off the wharf, dives under the flaming sea,

swims underwater out to a waiting boat. He says that when Reeves did his first breast stroke,
his shoulder ripped again. He would have been burned if he'd come to the surface.

He boasted that Reeves had refused to take the lead in Leone’s spaghetti westerns.

And that he’d had the role of James Bond for the asking.

Looking like someone had spat on his dog, he pooh-poohed the notion that Opus Dei
had backed the movie and the martyring of the Christians.
He ignored the question whether the short skirts objectified Mr Universe’s muscle-honed body.

I reminded him that he had remembered Cheyenne knife-fighting in yellowish-red quicksand

when the entire series was actually shot in black-and-white.
He became the resident rowdy face-slapper at our film-theory fest.

Morning ....

Morning. The sun spills green on the gentle hill.

Unstoppable light dances on diamond waves,

The seeping glow is the sun swelling in a trance.

Then the sea breeze sings itself to easy sleep.

But his soul inside is a chamber of loneliness.

Time whispers through withering vines of absence.

The bitter nettle of separation stings his heart.

His soul’s collapse goes down into meaninglessness.

Wing-beats

The evening grows wing-beats like a crow.

The black it beats hangs on the farmhouse roof.

Birds fly to the wood, his last night in their throats.

The day drifts like a played-out fiddle tune.

He waits hard breaths for time to disappear him.

The mysteries of their moments flutter round the bed.

She remakes from head to toe the liveliness

Of the loved man her life curled up next to.

The small hours weigh his breath down like a stone.

His breath lightens as death drips on his face.

On the window mute flowers give cover to the room.

Cows outside with bent necks chew biscuits of hay.

The dawn creaks on the landing and the stairs.
He often said his cows smiled while chewing cud.

The forever where he sinks to is blind to the blue.
As the morning breeze sings itself to sleep,
He gives the wonder of his first breath back to her.

The soul’s collapse goes on until the emptiness

Becomes infinite at a point in its curved core.

Memories tuck away like bales in a barn.

The sun lemon-lights the fragrance of the flowers,

And time goes on with metal star indifference.

Mark and the Fox Stopped Time

It is before he goes to village Africa.

The night shines like bright particles of fine ash.

Darkness ghosts, so luminous beneath the trees.

A gasp of shape from the radiance becomes a fox,

Ballet-dancing skittishly as he chases stout white moths.

Mark sits down on the dew-glazed warm-breezed grass,

Offers a sweet to the fox who takes it, graciously.

The night vibrates like the sway of mud in a holed boat.

The moon dances on its burden boards, the clouds shiver

In the water. Mark and the fox in Boden Park

Find hosannaed space, a tree-planked suburban ark.

The fox's ease during their moon-blessed meeting,

Like the stick-stand of a heron or the tail twist of a trout,
Freeze-frames for eternity a sacred joyful moment.

David

Like the controls on a radio,

The weather fixed the day’s settings.

The ragged wind down the Liffey

Buffaloed the field’s longish grass,

Gagged the sliothair in the air,

Stitched spectators’ coats sideways.

First half, our hurleys took the brunt:

The wind gagged my side-line cut.

The bank-rooted trees panted hard.

Second half, we pucked eastward:

David beat them by a pocket of points.

The river hushed acres seaward.

Changing, we fumed about the ref.

The Saturday morning flicked ice.

We shivered like tree trunks in snow.

November tests your hurling faith.

David, his black hair like a crow,

Headed for the boats by the mill.

Nightlong, he was missing. Weeklong.

Ten days. A tulle of thin fog

Choked our hearts with a cold hand.

Along the hushed gleaming river

It veiled the weeds that held him.

Who used to laugh, Pass the effing ball.

On the bridge in Chapelizod,

In reveries of mist, a boy,

I watched in case David came

Down the weir in his wellingtons.

I did not want him to go down

To the sea where the sharks circled.

The evening’s shape is changing.

The trees rustle their leaf blessings.

Like flamingos on stilettos

Landed from an exotic lake,

Braving slippery Nassau Street,

Young women peer into boutique

Shop windows on Grafton Street,

Permeate the air with perfume

And the tease of silk and colour.

In the misted-over window

Their under-water faces smile

At a babble of bubbly boys.

David would have dazzled them bright

With ‘Howya girls!’ in his smile.

A violin silvers the yearning

Of a nightingale. And David

Deafens the guilt of memory,

This day, every November. 

Devonshire’s Causeway Bridge

He used to imagine that the stone of its hush-washed hump

Creaked in the estuary silence. In the night-ache of exile

Its single segmental arch had floated on his memory,

A string-coursed sandstone image, fading like a photograph.

St Patrick’s Day 1952

He has the hurt of having to leave Dungarvan to find work.

He dawdles before dawn on Devonshire’s bridge, like Adam.

Night-gloom turns to ash and burns away in a fire-funnel of sun.

The alchemy of dawn changes the grey to pouring-honey gold.

Spring is here, sliding off the Cruachain like a green shawl.

There is a lilt to the melody of the Colligan’s water flow,

As if it dreams of the ocean miles away past Helvick Head.

Or the hookers that hauled fish for salting on the quays,

Or four-oar rowing-boat races on St Augustine’s pattern day,

Or a grief of gull screams ghost-wailing after trim trawlers.

The air is frigid with the grey-sludge stench of cowhide tanning pits,

And the ghosts of famine paupers going blind on the quays.

Later, near the weigh station he watches the parade in Grattan Square.

The good-grace cheering, the rackety rumble of cars, lorries, tractors.

Jim Cooney in his pyjamas lies in a bed on Maloney’s lorry.

At the junction of Youghal Street his brother Anthony smiles.

St Patrick’s Day 2016

.

His sons tend their fat-fleshed cattle in Half Moon Bay.

The warm whispering breeze bids the green buds burst forth.

A lark tinkle-trills its scale above reed-grass in river-side fields.

The bay curves in tranquil depths to blue-green Pacific infinity.

Once again he is the shadowy silhouette on the hump-back bridge.

He has returned to the place of his dead fathers and kindred, like Jacob.

Between its flanking panelled piers he stands as the circle of sea

Seeps in and out of the bay laving and lapping the Cuinneagar.

In the county museum he found the mason’s language of the bridge:

Rusticated square-cut sandstone from Runcorn, panelled plinths,

Supporting lamps, squared soffits, and scrolled keystone.

He marvels at the green floodlit sheen of the cleaned bridge.

The harbour is a seashell magnifying the voices on the quays.

He watches a rising boat on a serene sandbar stir the light-mist air.

And the wind-rippled midnight waters light with dancing stars.

He knows the eye of the bridge was his eye to the world.

The Uncanny Art of Vulgar Things

Diane Arbus was a mink-stole princess living a fairy tale

Of silences and cold emptiness with the king and queen of ice,

She longed to leave the palace for an adventure in shantytown.

The mannequins in her father’s store sneered at her and over

The counter the sales staff bowed with bitter looks of resentment.

Father was absent with promotions to plan and women to pleasure.

Mother was depressed and stayed in bed, planning dinner with cook,

Smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, patting her face in a mirror.

Keeping up a false front was the tried-and-tested Nemerov way

Diane sensed a black ball of shadow haunting the plushiness.

She had no fairy godmother’s wand to magic her through her glooms.

So she turned her face into life’s slap, provoking the unreal world

Into clear Rollei squares of wild molten in her sideshow of freaks.

At a cost. The boy with a toy grenade in his hand was playing,

But she was primed to implode into the emptiness of her being.

Unlike her, the Backwards Man in his mac could see his past behind him.

She knew only what she wished for, a being not swamped by nothingness.

To be recognised. With hairy shirtless tattooed-torso, the glowing man

Strikes a fearless prize-fighter’s pose and seems to see her from his soul.

He doesn’t. She was forging documentary proof of her divided self.

Transgressive. It was as if an eyeless soul suddenly saw

Electricity. Touched wires. Lit up the darkness in the self.

The Wade twins wear the green dresses their mother made them.

She shoots them to embody the good and sinister sides of a single girl.

Trying to lick the roots of her being, she could not reckon reality.

There was a constant. She wanted to get into someone else’s skin.

In Revelations she is naked across a man’s lap looking

Like she is going to shed her aloneness in a bed merger of flesh.

She shape-shifted to get her way, to share the privacies of life.

Sex slimed its ooze into her shots as if she actually lived connection.

She was battling hard to preserve the stain of her existence.

But in Untitled the mentally disabled subjects do not see her,

Do not wish to share the secret of her secrets or her presence.

The truth is she was walking a tightrope stretched above the void waiting

For someone to scream; their silence was the scream that unbalanced her.

Her ferret ferocity had hunted freak-show faces to fantasticate.

Like as if a giddy young nun on her gleeful ministry, camera-wimpled,

Naughty in her private sin, transgressive, dared you to look away.

Her ‘freaks’ look as if they had a death riddle for her to divine.

Her camera shot her death in existence, her own pathology.