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Irish Pages LTD
After the ConferenceAuthor(s): Gary AllenSource: Irish Pages, Vol. 3, No. 2, The Home Place (2006), pp. 61-62Published by: Irish Pages LTDStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30057413 .
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IRISH PAGES
something we have lost along the way: in our ignorance, everything is reduced to a likeness of ourselves.
The lights are coming on
though the horizon is still hard white
and in that moment before the true darkness the blue shadows of the kitchen the impression of dry branches iron railway-lines, bare telegraph-poles
I wait for some meaning, or inherent truth that never come from an earth farther from the sun:
then I think of them, not long removed their rakes and shovels aligned in some shed skins of mould and rotten leaf hanging from nails -
and I see them at a high table
breaking bread, pouring water
every movement precise and concentrated like a night frost, or a moon's ascent -
or a miracle for the few.
61
AFTER THE CONFERENCE
I fell in love one late Autumn afternoon with the enclosed cement courtyard of a Blackpool hostel
the feeble sun falling down the webbed guttering to the weedy flags
and settling for this extended moment on a drain choked with a clump of nettles:
no cliffs or wooded headland fall to the sea -
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IRISH PAGES
beyond this sandy sidestreet of poor immigrants is a flat grey shoreline:
and in a small hall in the Winter Gardens
they talk of Larkin and Connolly.
The electricity has been cut-off, someone is hammering together partitions in these once grand rooms -
is it Saturday? yes, this is all the Saturdays of childhood
sitting on the backdoor step too cold to do anything no one come back yet -
it's how we stretch time beyond law
taking everything outside ourselves and making it sublime - like religion,
then the sun is gone the walls returning to icy blackness like a racing commentator's voice
and I realise that love belongs as much to the ideal as to all the dead and inanimate things.
62
VISION
In clear blue eyes my father lies upon the sofa
happed like a child in swathing
how pale they have become, in dying as still water looked into -
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