A Calendar

Sun low in southwest sinking as I turn head sinking teeth into another crabapple: pale yellow crabapple, pale yellow air, pale yellow in bottles of instant clarity after crabapples let ferment in the cellar

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The swallows long finished school, ready soon to depart. Ladybirds scatter over the page. All in flitters

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Dark night of the teeth passed, cooled my knuckles against brick, felt light hard and warm on one side, shadow cold as of stone on the other

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Then up head haught now to take last warmth of sun full on the throat

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This missive written to you zero sheets to the wind yet canted as if half-pissed in the armchair. Weather warning has the town besieged altogether: windstrafes, hailspit, ack-ack go of it. Force 10 from Navan. This close the coast town’s a wee fort—chippy’s blue lights, bingo hall, supermarket, hunkered and hubbed around what’s ours. This suave mare magno feel’s what I fear in myself: my moral awareness a busted neon line, a needling allover buzz—one that goes off, off, on, all goodwill and no good at all

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New highway not the worst. Not close enough to cause true bother: and the lights company, even, nights—far off, close

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Oh to yawn own head off, never again hear a yatter from that fucker battened to the peg of my neck

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Feel utterly abolished as always after Dublin. Sinister hole. Ought not to have bothered bringing the eyes in my head

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Impious pity inclines me toward the damned, so tired of moving, who find suitable hole and lie down for keeps—sole ambition I begin to share

Turned out in the dark and cold, mind up to the knees in its totter over deserts of self-translation while body blundered heavily south via Mud Island over the suicides’ burial ground and the wreck left by the German bombs—now shimmering under pale lilac smoke of bombweed—via Five Lamps, shrine to Matt Talbot, the church with the Greek inscription suggesting no celestial runoff of glory from only-wise God via saviour to the poor straggling damned below in their infernal freezing chaos constructed out of such only-wise wisdom subsequent to extratemporal mullings in great silent glory

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To live there unimaginable. And the vagary that got me out for which word dream too strong that being to go across the waves and there feel like you might have been from somewhere else with a different language motoring away in your mouth all along as impossible

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Smothering coalblack nights air flocculent with petrol fumes and hopes for a beyond that turned out never to have been there

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Howling cold winter. All emptied out. Word requires haulage over another few steps, characters require inching along. Left two in a garage between whippings staring out at a car while their father polished again and again and again a muffler with an oily rag

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Neither were me

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Steady coldish eastering light. Best I can manage a feeble wave from amid confusion

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Smells: straw, equine urine. Electric fire. Big bow window right on grey sea, greyer stones

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Couldn’t write in all the chatter and patter. Drew instead wreckages of sentences—long hair tapering in curls down the white; hole ground after long biro rumblings against the white of the page till shreds clung to black ink slick; constellation of flecks around pearly blank hubs; serifs made into gulls; tangles of longstemmed letters adangle from pergola of upper line

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A few primitive windmills, lots of donkeys, crumbled dry stone walls everywhere fine as dice

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Breathing continues with little interruption

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Wind, grey, tatters

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Thought words: where words inane thought in turn becomes inane

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Dead tired after ferry. Tottered back in mist. Oh never to make another move

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Decay in lieu of mastery: a relinquishing not of the order of the fetishized zen archer or the unfetishized jazz calligraphist or the like

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Avalanche of drafts that no drafting can trowel any lower

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All us soft pink interiors bopping around not after any trouble

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S. above amid Paris confusion tending to what needs tending to. All so veiled and shaky. Old melancholy spice went through me of the temptation to temptation but never enough of a scald to download the thrashings and threesomes app where S. and I met

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Today a rainy snow from the east swirling whitening the Santé prison and me here lashed with thoughts of blizzard-lashed Paolo and Francesca. The horny damned

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Filthy brightness—sinister. Wind and rain ceaseless

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All night the prisoners howled like beasts

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Birthday came and passed: awful occasion now happily with all others down time’s old drain leaving the donkey to die on in peace lapping peaceably at the grid

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Snow and ice in the Louis-le-Grand mansards. Cobbles and dead straggles of gillyflowers on the sills. Who requires such lyricism nowadays. Not even me

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S. said how at shrines offerings are burned here to pass via smoke and reappear on the other side as a form of writing which tastes on that side to the lapping ghost both of the offering and of the smoke

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Reasonlessly picked out the Belgian flag in pub’s bloodlights, yellow headlamps, black of cobbles

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Afternoon neons deep in the street’s throat. Hail. Limestone grisaille

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Agoraphobia of my empty calendar: left the little black breviary of addresses and engagements behind in Florence Arrivals

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Craving as leadweighted hook-drag through belly’s stilled lake, tug of it strong enough for unknowable tides to roll hard over dentilated submarine ridges, ripple the lot

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Rise and fall of leaves above draught of their own burning. Tart chimneysmoke tang through banked fog, through smothering light. Work keeps the loneliness dosed without use of drink

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Time’s last oozing, precious and worthless together: amber sap-beads an oak weeps

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Day that illness relieved every sixteen hours by calmative: recrudescence every subsequent eight

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This course of course impossible

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Owls every night. Good to be in the mist amid rooks and starlings

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Less so to be amid sex-obsessed nightingales, their scraking 

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More or less marooned out here with bitter cold and state of roads. Couldn’t be better pleased. Absolute silence and peace twenty-four hours out of twenty-four

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Am become a calm snowed block dropped miraculously whole from some catastrophe

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Snowbound under drafts I trowel away daily

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All verbs dead under work’s rubble

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In that refuse I wish to refuse anything that might even convert to sugar in the body, subsist instead on twigs, pebbles etc

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Trim instead another crabapple. Cool of the floor cups balls of feet through slippers

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And now at last long lone sunray breaking red through clouds’ broken ceiling until all is frost, all night, I alone now among deepening shades. Adieu day

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To and fro in shadow, inner to outer. One last stravage through outer shadow loaded with moths while the inner layers up a black lacquer all its own

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Last dead of night in dead of night looked up from book, dreamt moon one arc of immense scissors held by woman all in black, utter tedium of Yeats, stink on me for good: yet such comfort in accuracy if not familiarity for all that

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And still look up from dark of letters to pore on other dark till afar taper faint in the fog sun’s lone lorn pale eye

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Even for space gazing no zest left. To find silence before death the plan and now having found silence plan becomes dread

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Viaticum:pre-flight foostering about. Tend to those last things that might weigh me down should we go airborne and flare out before fully up: eg., the volt of shock and rage and self-rebuke when another text to you drops into slatey quiet

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You’ve disappeared into Europe and want to stay that way, milled by bad rents—I get it

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This written for an earnest of 3.80 tofu and black bean in your studio, forking from the same bowl, vape gusts thick about us, you clattering away at your laptop, I at mine

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Your work dreamt of a fricative so sharp as to cleave the tongue in half, plosives loud enough to blow molars from their sockets; mine, of smooth sidling swerve, all dash and solo-run: language as fretboard, surfboard. Smug baubleworthy stuff—too easy, too fluent

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Never a fit for me. All given up now for the dutiful plod to midway uphill to watch phosphorescence of others spill through the dark

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But you were being yourself, you would say, so put up with yourself

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Youth’s a frazzle, its aftermath a fumble. Desperate postulant lost to desperate posturings, I cast about me, headrush stars blitzing my vision, as I ask myself what the hell all that was in aid of

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The answer may come by dusk. But I wouldn’t bet on it

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At the old loose end yet again. Worrying the frays. Why bother. Not cut out for not bothering. Little talent for serenity, still less for stillness

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Light of day. Now light of night. Legs as tired of carrying as I am tired of being carried: all winter, no journey

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Two poets I know die. One old but not old enough. One no longer young but still too young

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The younger poet told me how the editors published her letter to an older man poet, had not said fully who she was in the credits, a look on her face as though dismayed with her own dismay, as though she’d made too much of herself: or of the editors, more like, and the spurious purity she’d attributed to their motives

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The brief caesura your wit cuts in the roaring now a respite devoutly to be wished, sister: your talent for big silences, your utter ineptitude at small talk

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A mere jerk from one weary of words and tangled in the double net both of words and that larger obscure distress of a net known as life

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Blazes here or there, from the dark

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One evening dark and early alone in threewalled shed eating crabapples brought by neighbour from her patchy orchard. Literally idyllic, literary idyll— for better, for worse. Rooted retiree arriving in his green-glade paradise too early to know what to do except totter about, look at things, try new drinks. I’ve purred so long in my own afterglow that my throat can no longer hit the hard notes, deckle the words. Gaudens gaudeo, I’m meant to say, and so I do, mustering anew in me that rumble like the earth opening. Misty. Grey. Counting molehills

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Shape of shed recalls perhaps inescapably old green hood of creepers on the pergola of home. Dreaming too loud a word

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Clouds the colour of letters I pulp in a bucket out the back the better to leave no trace when all this is at long last at an end

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A hawk floated poised with scarcely a quiver of its wings on lowering morning clouds and watched for prey

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Watch as the sky closes in. Long dragging suction of car on new highway a tide going out not bothered to return

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Each day, each question a letter opener between the ribs. Long slow bleed stanched by knowledge No is a complete sentence

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Have today written two hundred complete sentences

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Having found upon ground black thread one inch long took same up and stretched between both forefingers, both thumbs and strove all day to pull atwain till sundown then let fall and in light of sundown watched slow fall to the ground brief tilde then on ground again

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New motorway out of sight and sound. None as I write but rain quietly dropping and the odd cars and the buzzing in my ear I’m but a body. Eat evenings alone in solitary sordidity. At most odd quiet drunk in corner while I erect of back with sobriety all nerves

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So empty yet so plugged with muck in every valve. Why even say

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Well past clutches of churches, flying on, a mad totter along wayside 

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Odd tumbling filigreed joy electric in chest at unglued laws of time

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Heart prised open, black guck seeped out and gone. Hoke with an index finger amid muck, pellets. Now nothing to tell. What little there was to tell so little now told. Never less to tell. Less than ever to tell. Nothing left tellable to tell. Of that untellable little, little else of uninterest to tell

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This white air you can see so far through. These indigo and violet corrugations at dusk that I never quite find anywhere else but here: and never quite here, either

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The light has collapsed and will not come again

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Last peerings around the wreck after something left worth saying, then a last quiet

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Release never to write another again. Maximum two. Then a few more last years—keep bees, grow lavender for bees. Lapse. Fall, cease

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Harvesters east, south, west, after weeks of rain and grey

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First crocuses—very small and pale. Now too first slow walks in the gloaming with a crooked old stick. Pale, small beginning again. At this stage of things even that kind of thing too hideous to face

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Long flame to you my friend out there in the hideous gale

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Nothing more of uninterest to add for now

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Tim MacGabhann is the author of two novels, Call Him Mine and How to Be Nowhere; a long poem, Rory Gallagher—Live!—at the Hotel of the Dead; and a memoir, The Black Pool.