Paul Durcan: Christmas Day

Excerpt One 

                    There was a young widow in black

                    In Glasnevin Cemetery. I heard her

                    Before I saw her - the tapping

                    On the tarmacadam of her high heels.

                    I spun around and I saw her

                    Hurdling towards me across the headstones,

                    Her yellow hair tucked into her black suede jacket,

                    Her blue mini-skirt more daring than a fig leaf,

                    The white ponies of her teeth

                    Riding red lipstick.

                    As we were about to pass

                    We stopped and stared

                    And she smiled and I gazed

                    Into the waterfall of her eyes

                    Waiting for it to stop

                    Thinking that she was a clock

                    But she was not a clock -

                    She was a woman,

                    A preoccupied soul.

                    Is there a role

                    For my twenty-three-year-old son?

                    She said: 'Have you got the time?'

                    I said: 'It is three o'clock.'

                    She said - as if I had invented time -

                    With dismay: 'Is it three o'clock?'

                    And I wanted to change my mind and say

                    That there was no time today,

                    That Christmas Day is a timeless day.

                    Instead I repeated: 'It is three o'clock'

                    And she walked on out of my life

                    Up the aisle under the yews

                    Towards the Parnell altar stone.

                    When she was out of earshot I said to her:

                    'May I hold your hand?'

                                                        Excerpt Two

                    The worst thing about loneliness

                    Is not loneliness.

                    The worst thing about loneliness

                    Is selfishness:

                    The savagery of selfishness.

                                                    Excerpt Three 

                    Why do computer programmers always answer

                    When asked in questionnaires

                    In Sunday newspapers

                    What is your idea of Heaven? -

                    Snorkelling in Acapulco.

                    Why do they never say

                    What I would say?

                    My idea of Heaven as a man

                    Is to be lying on my back

                    Smiling up into the eyes of a woman,

                    Her face latticed by her hair,

                    Her shoulders braced

                    As she squats in her starting blocks.

                    She leaps out of her blocks

                    To race 100 metres

                    Over low hurdles

                    In 10.8 seconds

                    While I lie under her

                    Clinging to her

                    And she spits on my shoulder -

                    There! -

                    And whinnies and dozes

                    And then she straightens the pillows

                    And the blankets, folds me up,

                    All my parts,

                    And puts me away in her violin case

                    Until the next time she decides

                    To go to hounds and cross over the river

                    To the other side.

I Wish To Be Murdered By A Woman

Cemetery of a Boy's Childhood

Going Home to Mayo, Winter, 1949

Leaving behind us the alien, foreign city of Dublin
My father drove us through the night in an old Ford Anglia,
His five-year-old son in the seat beside him,
The rexine seat of red leatherette,
And a yellow moon peered in through the windscreen.
‘Daddy, Daddy,’ I cried, ‘Pass out the moon,’
But no matter how hard he drove he could not pass out the moon.
Each town we passed through was another milestone
And their names were magic passwords into eternity:
Kilcock, Kinnegad, Strokestown, Elphin,
Tarmonbarry, Tulsk, Ballaghedereen, Ballyvarry;
Now we were in Mayo and the next stop was Turlough,
The village of Turlough in the heartland of Mayo,
And my father’s mother’s house, all oil-lamps and women,
And my bedroom over the public bar below,
And in the morning cattle-cries and cock-crows:
Life’s seemingly seamless garment gorgeously rent
By their screeches and bellowings. And in the evenings
I walked with my father in the high grass down by the river
Talking with him – an unheard-of thing in the city.

But home was not home and the moon could be no more outflanked
Than the daylight nightmare of Dublin city:
Back down along the canal we chugged into the city
And each lock-gate tolled our mutual doom;
And railings and palings and asphalt and traffic lights,
And blocks after blocks of so-called ‘new’ tenements –
Thousands of crosses of loneliness planted
In the narrowing grave of the life of the father;
In the wide, wide cemetery of the boy’s childhood.

Paul Durcan

Because Everything Left is Already Said but Still Never Done, Paul Durcan

The White Window


Of my love's body I think
That it is a white window.
Her clothes are curtains:
By day drawn over
To conceal the light;
By night drawn back
To reveal the dark.

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Paul

In the rush-hour traffic outside the centre-city church

I stood with my bicycle waiting for the lights to change—

A Raleigh bicycle with upright handlebars

That I had purchased for two pounds fifty pence in The Pearl—

When a priest in black soutane and white surplice

Materialized in the darkness of the porch.

He glided over to me:

‘I am about to begin a funeral Mass but I have no mourners.

Would you be prepared to act as a mourner for me?’

As we paced up the aisle, the priest enlightened me:

‘He was about the same age as yourself,

All you know about him is that his name was Paul.’

I knelt in the front pew,

The coffin on trestles alongside me,

Its flat abdomen next to my skull.

I felt as a mother must feel

All alone in the maternity ward

With her infant in the cot at the foot of the bed,

A feeling that everything is going to be all right

But that we are all aliens in the cupboard,

All coat hangers in the universe.

The priest—a seven-foot-tall, silver-haired peasant in his eighties—

Instructed me to put my bicycle in the hearse beside the coffin.

The two of us sat in front with the driver.

At a major traffic junction near the cemetery of Mount Prospect

We had to brake to avoid knocking down a small boy.

The car behind us bumped into our rear bumper,

Inducing the bicycle to bump against the coffin.

We saw a prominent politician in the back seat blessing herself.

At the graveside as the priest said prayers

I got the feeling that the coffin was empty;

That Paul, whoever he was.

Was somewhere else.

‘How do you know that his name was Paul?’

I asked the priest as we tiptoed away.

He handed me a creased sheet

Of blue vellum unlined notepaper—Belvedere Bond:

Dear Paul—Thank you for your marriage proposal

But I am engaged to be married in Rome in June.

Best wishes always, Mary

Queen of Loneliness.

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A Vision of Democracy in the County of Meath

When I got up this morning, I went out

To look at the rain. I had planned

To spend the morning with my gun,

Thinking about the story of my life.

But I saw that it was raining

And I decided to go out and have a look at the rain.

What struck me about the rain was how lit up,

Illuminated and fluorescent it was,

A bright rain of democracy.

The sky was grey as sheep

And tumbling over itself on low legs

But the rain was wearing lights under its tights

And strip lighting in the stitching of its jackets.

I saw in the park in front of the house

A Singer sewing machine freshly painted black.

Its treadle was pumping up and down

When the woman who was sitting at it saw me look at her

She looked up and shaking her head a little

She smiled and shook her head a little again and stated:

‘I am just an ordinary democrat’,

And when I looked as if

I was about to reach for a quiver of words

She repeated herself without emphasis:

‘I am just an ordinary democrat—

Take me as I am or not at all.’

I began to walk across the park towards her,

Ready to hand in my gun, ready to vote,

Ready to vanish, ready to disappear,

Wanting only to be her servant in all things great and small.

I will take you as you are or not at all.

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La Terre des Hommes

Fancy meeting you out here in the desert:

Hallo Clockface.

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Aughawall Graveyard

Lonely lonely lonely lonely:

The story with a middle only.

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The Difficulty that is Marriage

We disagree to disagree, we divide, we differ;

Yet each night as I lie in bed beside you

And you are faraway curled up in sleep 

I array the moonlit ceiling with a mosaic of question marks;

How was it I was so lucky to have ever met you?

I am no brave pagan proud of my mortality

Yet gladly on this changeling earth I should live for ever

If it were with you, my sleeping friend.

I have my troubles and I shall always have them

But I should rather live with you forever

Than exchange my troubles for a changeless kingdom.

But I do not put you on a pedestal or throne;

You must have your faults but I do not see them.

If it were with you, I should live for ever.

Paul Durcan