The Reed Bed

  Note to Reader

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  Praise for The Reed Bed

  Healy’s verse shows the range his writing is capable of, and the risks he is prepared to take. As with the narrative journeys of his novels and memoirs, his poetry is not content with just one epiphany. It must know what happens after joy and after revelation, driven by a brave necessity which strives to be thrilled again and to know what comes next.

  These poems are remarkable for their searing sincerity and for the humanely frank intelligence with which they try to comprehend the possibilities of people, their fears and insecurities, their paranoia and inarticulacy, and finally their deaths. All this is perceived from the potentially terrifying and opaque distance from reality which characterizes Healy’s world, in which moments of clarity often precede a vertiginous fall towards a state of understanding which is overwhelming.

  — Colin Graham, The Irish Times

  Generally favouring a brief line and short stanzas, Healy creates a mood of regret and grief that is modified by the harshness of nature into a tough stoicism. There is no self-pity here in the recollection of severed relationships or evocations of loneliness, rather there is a realization that life is best faced by staring into the terrifying infinite spaces that Pascal spoke of. A metaphysical froideur is never far away in Healy, even in the most domestic of his topics.

  — Rory Brennan, Books Ireland

  Gallery Books

  Editor: Peter Fallon

  THE REED BED

  THE REED BED

  Dermot Healy

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Note to Reader

  Praise for The Reed Bed

  Editor’s Info Page

  Title Page

  A Ball of Starlings

  When They Want to Know What We Were Like

  The Purging

  All the Meteors

  I Catch Sight of Them as I Often Do

  The Longing

  Away with the Birds

  Just Then

  The Hallway

  The Blackbird

  Tongs

  When We Talk of What’s Out There

  Those Days

  The Reed Bed

  Only Just

  The Task

  Chalkey’s Grave

  Who is That?

  A Warning

  Sunday, 16 August 1998

  Alas

  The West End

  The Words

  A Sober Night with Stars

  Plants, Heavy with Berry

  The Strange Impasse

  The Whispering Shells

  Walls

  The Wall I Built

  The Sky Road

  What Happened at Noon?

  A Breeze

  The Cat

  Larkin’s Room in a Storm

  One Minute with Eileen

  Wonderers

  Reaching the Rockies

  Somerset Maugham on Bass with The Harp Jazz Band in Enniskillen

  Father and Son

  First Thing

  About the Author

  Also by Dermot Healy

  Copyright

  Back Cover

  THE REED BED

  A Ball of Starlings

  for Seamus Colreavy

  As evening falls

  over the bulrushes

  parties of starlings

  arrive in flurries

  to join the other shape-makers

  at the alt. The swarm blows

  high, dives out of sight

  in a beautiful aside,

  till there’s scarce a trace

  of a bird —

  then a set of arched wings appears,

  then another,

  hundreds turn

  as one,

  and suddenly over the lough

  a whispering ball of starlings

  rises into

  the blue night

  like a shoal of sardines

  gambolling underwater

  and, changing shape,

  the birds

  rise in the vast dark

  like hayseed

  till the puff-ball

  explodes

  and the birds

  suddenly flip

  again into nothingness:

  and when the roost reappears out of the deep

  in a great teeming net

  of birdsong

  the din grows intense

  as they build

  these last perfect

  arcs, these ghostly

  gall-bows,

  before making

  one final sweep

  that ends

  in a ticking globe

  above the reeds;

  then, chattering, the starlings spill

  across the black fields.

  When They Want to Know What We Were Like

  When they want to know what we were like

  they will search for the barriers we raised

  against the wind. Aggression and erosion will place us

  exactly. The way our battery walls faced

  will tell them the direction

  of the worst storms. A grave will be a windfall

  for the weathermen. Our skeletons

  will have a tilt to the spine

  on account of walking head-down,

  our lungs be huge from shouting in gales.

  And everything they find will have been

  somewhere else to start with.

  How far have the cereals been blown

  from the field in which they were sown?

  And what of the moments of calm

  that have been scattered over the wide acres?

  The Purging

  The sea would rot

  if it didn’t rise.

  All that spring cleaning!

  All that washing away,

  night and day,

  day and night,

  of what the rivers carried

  down from the mountains.

  And then at last

  the drying. The lying still.

  The crackle of a sheet.

  The whispering water.

  The towelling breeze.

  See at the bar

  after the purging

  the new man

  water-mirrored

  with the moon in his lap.

  All the Meteors

  Yesterday there were

  things to be done.

  Now, nothing.

  It closes in.

  All the meteors

  have landed.

  Six swans cruise

  through the dark

  and though I can sense

  their cold-webbed feet,

  the ruffled water

  of the dark flood,

  the whole thing is a blur.

  I’m pinned

  down here in a wind

  from the south

  among the wooden poor

  of Ecuador,

  the hee-hawing ass,

  a dog,

  a limping cat,

  and whatever in the wide world

  awaits me

  after that.

  I Catch Sight of Them as I Often Do

  I catch sight of them as I often do

  by chance, these stars,

  these settlements of light,

  and looking up last thing last night

  I realised that just as their light

  is only now reaching us, long after

  they have g
one out of existence,

  where I now stand others have looked up

  that are long gone.

  They too

  have gone out of existence,

  these sea-folk who stored stars

  in their heads for direction

  and prayer;

  the light from the stars

  that reached them reaches me,

  their existence shines down on my head

  though they are long dead.

  The light they saw then

  is the light I see now,

  and the light they saw then came from others

  further back, looking up, like them,

  like me, and the next to come after me;

  and so on … the light of our lives

  shining down on some other

  who by chance looked up

  before turning in for the night.

  The Longing

  The wide skirt of damp rock

  on the giving tide.

  Myself uneasy at the mirror.

  I fight the longing.

  This sick longing

  enters me.

  I have been amiss.

  I better stop out of town.

  All these fragments

  weigh me down.

  I do not want to go on

  because you will not

  be with me.

  Above our heads,

  above our heads,

  the lightning

  is searching the dark

  for one perfect opening.

  Away with the Birds

  Just before a long journey

  I get so homesick

  that I can hardly talk,

  or think, or eat,

  all those half-heard notes

  of transience

  gather, the sough

  and regret,

  till this, I think with a start,

  may be forever.

  I’m so glued to this place

  I get light in the head

  at the thought of being elsewhere.

  This time Hartnett

  won’t be behind me

  on the plane

  to spray water on.

  The lungs will be gripped

  by the ribs like claws.

  A gin or two in the air

  won’t make up for the small habits

  of every day. I’m finished.

  Life will go awry.

  And then there’s the faces

  of people saying goodbye.

  Do they not see the fate

  ordained for you?

  The air-conditioners

  going up into a whine

  in some hotel where

  last night’s lovers are still at it

  salaciously in your bed.

  In a panic I launch

  into something that will never

  get finished, begin something

  better left unsaid.

  In the other room

  you’re putting away

  trousers, shirts,

  blouses, lipstick,

  while in here

  I’m pretending to work

  the words when, in fact,

  I’m away with the birds,

  already sitting

  out on the runway

  at Kuala Lumpur

  with a crossword

  I began in Strandhill

  and now half-way

  round the world

  I’m getting nowhere

  wondering why I’m there

  while I could be here,

  and wondering why,

  while I’m here,

  I’m there already

  by the southern ocean

  beginning another round

  of superstitions

  to keep me going

  and fill the distances between

  the place I’m in

  and the place I’m not,

  not like in the old days

  when I couldn’t wait

  to enter

  the vast strangeness —

  before first light

  already on the road,

  the thumb up,

  the world before me.

  Just Then

  Just then I saw the earth below

  with such clarity

  that I forgot

  my station in life.

  Not a word about mortality.

  No. Just these beings

  generous to a fault

  adding to existence,

  then taking off

  with their bag of tricks

  and sores and complaints

  and works and loves,

  ponies, asses, dogs,

  and that death rattle

  which comes from the core

  to leapfrog

  into the memory of those

  who will remember

  them. With the passage

  of time it’s harder to get a mention

  unless you’re invented

  again. Nothing doing

  in the onion bed

  or under the bonnet of the car.

  Nothing stirring among

  the blue bottles of Milk of Magnesia

  for the bouts of indigestion.

  The plastic shoes fill

  with rainwater. The new crowd

  are sitting in your chairs.

  Things go on the same.

  But there’s hope —

  at a wedding party

  an old fogey — myself —

  breaks out in tears

  at the mention of your name.

  The Hallway

  Sometimes I find myself back in the bed I grew up in

  floating there in the fever of adolesence

  or if I’m not lying in that long bed

  by Burke’s whitewashed shed

  more often than not I am down in the hallway by the hall-stand

  where something is after happening.

  It’s unnerving to be so intensely young again.

  Now youth is a nightmare from which I can’t awake.

  I’m back standing at the bottom of the stairs

  at the half-glassed doorway onto the street

  and outside the town beats like a cymbal.

  I’m there most nights on the tiles,

  high tide or low tide, or wherever I am

  I’m back in the hall by the hall-stand

  where the coats hang from question marks.

  I am neither shadow nor substance.

  It is not where you would expect to find yourself

  after some years on the earth.

  The house is dark and silent.

  The door has just closed behind me or soon will open.

  What darkness! What silence!

  The Blackbird

  I had great plans for the blackbird that came to live with us.

  I’d camp out under his bush to catch his first stirrings, the first shout of ‘I’m alive’ to her,

  ‘Is there anybird else out there?

  I’m alive, listen …’

  Then, as he shunted through his tunes, I below would hear him ask

  his mate what she would like to hear, Would she like to hear the one I learned from my father,

  and he from his?,

  that dawn spurt

  of delicious notes about jealousy, dreams. Do hear me, mate? Do you hear me, mate?

  I mean it, Forgive me, Fasten the bow, Loose the sail, Eat the fruit, Tip the scales, Accept the shock,

  and all that questioning

  of the resolute heavens,

  you heart, scald-lady, Do you mind, Do you mind how we were separated in November

  by somebird, by somebird, How the wind cleaves, Him getting wilder in his confessions,

  then the sudden silence,

  and the quiet shame.

  In my bed at five, I heard him step out of his nest and charge his trilling bill with joy.

  At sadness, heard him pluck, scold, stop, teeter, sway, call in
the animals at sunset

  whistle for the fun of it,

  and the forgetfulness.

  He’s on the gate with a stiffening tail-feather tilted like a toothpick looking east.

  He’s gone, I think. The blackbird’s gone, I say. Then, next thing, I hear a song must be his.

  There she is scuttling,

  yellow-beaked, into the shadows.

  The whistling blackbird, first to stop in this bare place, has planted trees and rose hedgerows.

  She’s set seeds. He’s tilled, trimmed, brought in a harvest of treesong from way inland.

  He lifts the stonechat’s heart.

  He silences whitearse

  when londubh assails the coming dark with all the words we have ever heard said in anger,

  in love, he loves the quick of it timing every last refrain as the sun is leaving Jimmy’s window

  When the bird stops

  Suddenly. Suddenly.

  For days I listened but it was too late. They’re gone, I’ll never camp out below their song.

  I lost my chance. I had a river at the bottom of my garden. I had a lake, a pool.

  I had a high tree, I had the warmth of a high tree,