Note:
Use of  italics indicates citation. A note on sources follows the text.

 

How complete + final the feeling

In the rowboat someone whispers from the future
hold your temper loosely or like a fish

do something with the sound like it’s your friend.

Bullrushes at the lake’s edge weave with the breeze

you waver, pulled between two incomplete and incompatible strands of feeling.

In the rowboat for a moment those strands weave a taut line between the two of you—Ted and Nick—pulling on a net to haul a pike in.

Some forty years from now, on a hilltop seven miles from here, Storm Ernesto will blow a haunted melody through rattled gates.

Sycamore leaves will scissor prematurely through late-summer air whipped up to a frenzy, crows will scatter like flung charcoal with some bits of you mixed in.

We live among badly analysed compounds, and are ourselves badly analysed compounds, Gilles Deleuze said in one of his lessons on the cinema.
I woke in the early hours with that thought in my ears. The word he used in French was mixtes, an archaic scientific word for compound, and one of six things I’ve retained from science class is that the elements of a compound are chemically bound, not just muddled together.
What are you compounded of, poet in a boat with a boy by his side and a pike in the curve of his net?

*

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*

I stand outside in the end of summer drizzle, feel myself merging with grey raindrops, high keening of wind through the gate, shambling slug whose black antennae probe the afternoon damp, feeling a way ahead through humid air and drooping grass-stalks.  This is just one moment in the life of a compound in the making that has not yet been analysed, well or badly.

Oh void, oh void the muddled parts that make the compound ‘I’ rush in to fill and fuse with before nature has a chance to start abhorring.

I have been staring at Barrie Cooke’s pencil sketch for a month,  sucked into the mesh of scribbled lines whirling between two figures in a boat, hauling in a curved fish in a net.

They are a man and a boy to my eyes—an older boy, 17 or so—
straining under the weight of the pike.
This may not be the case.
My mind’s eye may have made father and son of them, cleaved in both senses of the contranym by the tangle of pencil lines.

*

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*

The muddled lines between man and boy, the bean-shaped boy-face, the joint attention trained on nature in the lake has stirred up some kind of mirroring vortex in me.

There is a photo I haven’t seen in 17 years, taken for the local paper on a hill above Lough Gur. It’s the two of us as one two-headed creature. You were barely more than one, towering over everyone from your perch in a backpack on my shoulders. You would never tolerate a buggy, struggled against the knee-view level it relegated you to. Hoisted in the air you were in your element, or looking past my head at your true element, the lake with its ducks and one mute swan.

There are places where you feel yourself being walked through by the ghosts of earlier iterations of yourself, and places where you have a strong sense that’s what should be happening, but it isn’t.

This rock is indeed lovely, its view of the Galtees beyond the lake even more so. I don’t feel the weight of a small human companion on my shoulders though. Quite the opposite.

Boy, girl, man, woman, when you’ve carried that weight a long time and it’s lifted off, you could lift off too, take off into the sky from an egg-shaped fort called Lovely Rock.

*

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The rock is not, in fact, called lovely—more probably named rock cliff or bright rock. I misinterpreted a misspelled sign.
It was lovely though, putting one foot in front of the other, walking egg-shapes on the hilltop, picking out the mountains from their shimmering mist, making out the footprint of the second lake, drained by the Victorians—or rather, their tenants, as a famine relief project. After a summer-full of rain the lost lake was trying to reassert itself, a bean-shape sheltered in the crook of the bigger lake’s elbow.

Bean-shape sheltered in the crook of the bigger lake’s arm, it will take more rain than even the most inclement summer can provide for you to spread back to your full self, but from up here I can see how you would join the bigger one—the two of you together overtake the valley—once the deluge comes. You’ll hardly have a moment to revel in your restored wholeness before you become one with the lake and the climbing water table.

Enjoy your discrete pond-hood while it lasts.

 

Two Coopers in a red room in the belly of the lake

Long before either of us found our way to this lake with our children, a local poet called Michael Hogan fished here, wrote in verse of two coopers from the city who came fishing to this shore only to fall foul of Gearóid Iarla—also known as Gearóid Fhile, which Cathal O’Shannon glosses as Gearóid the rhymer in a heartfelt 1960s piece for RTE railing against plans to develop the lakeshore into something he paints as a kind of Killarney with motels and motorboats.

Midway upon the lake’s dark breast,
The boat a moment seems to rest

Gearóid Iarla, Earl of Desmond, wrote poems in Irish and Anglo-Norman including famous lines in praise of women. Instead of dying, as most poets do, he took his sword and lay down in a cave at the bottom of the lake, our lake, ready to resurface with his white horse when called upon to save his people.
The version of him that surfaces in Hogan’s poem, vengeful and dripping polished gems,  bears little temperamental resemblance to the noble poet who disappeared into the lake until needed.

As if some hidden thing of force,
Had stopped her in her drifting course

Before their journey to the lake the two coopers awakened from wild dreams in which they had been swallowed whole by a large fish from the Lough Gur waters.

Later, chased by the malevolent revenant, they witness apocalyptic scenes unfolding on the lakeshore, rising up out of the hills and the water of the lake itself.

The clouds around the sky were hurled,
Like smoke-wreaths of a burning world
Pictures from the future flash before their eyes, scenes of flood and fiery devastation.

Each red flash, like a fiery snake,
Leaped on the storm’s back round the lake

In the poem, the angry Earl flings the coopers and their boat ashore. But in their shared dream nested inside the poem, they are trapped forever in the red room of a fish’s belly.

In their shared dream nested inside the poem, they have made a place for themselves on the lakebed by the poet-earl, until they’re called back to the burning world.

 

Some things I remember but they no longer live on the surface of my days

The robin’s sharp song is so much more energetic than the others that the bird-eavesdropping app can’t pick them up. Under cover of his bright jabbering, wren, goldcrest, long-tailed tit can carry on their discreet scheming, like mobsters by a dryer in the basement.

In an essay called ‘White Lines’, Fanny Howe mentions ‘the opaqueness of true poetry.’ In the garden, robins provide a colourful layer for other birds to work the white lines of their songs out under. ‘Listening for birds’ says Merlin, as some long-tailed game birds in the bog across the road shout ‘pheasant, pheasant’ at each other.

*

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*

some relics are more eloquent than any beaten metal

The flat tin fish that tops the gatehouse tower was motionless all week, winking at me in the Indian-summer sun.

I ask him for advice some days, ones where he’s grey against the grey sky, and I am too against the road. He never answers. Moving with the wind is his only form of message, or glinting with the sun. He conveys simple data about current meteorological conditions, in pleasingly concrete form.
It is the height of foolishness to solicit him for life advice.
He does, on balance, agree with the Rilke who said no feeling is final, but will be drawn no further.

*

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*

Before the landlords drained the second lake, an old woman lived inside a wedge tomb by the shore

her cell was upslope from the rushy bank that would become the painter’s, and later the poet’s, favourite casting-off spot

you’ve got to come 0ver because I think I’ve found the perfect place

the place from which to track this great prisoner-anchorite to his last refuge. To haul him out of his sanctuary. To hold him up, grey against the grey sky, and get the measure of his density of time compounded with matter, of dangling lines trailing tales of other battles.

*

*

*

 on the verge of extinction and metaphysical murky elusiveness

a void is opening

a tangle of pencil sketch is drawing in a trail of dangling lines, is pulling a living woman from a wedge tomb, a woman and a small girl from a hillside, a poet, a boat, a boy, a lake, a pike, a sleeping Earl.

*

*

*

On the lake edge, grass and air and water shimmer. Shapes waver in and out of stillness. The sharp outline of a man and boy unravels into tangled lines. In a newspaper photo softened by light, stripes disaggregate the figures of a mother and a child.

You never really know your child. There is always a veil, a curtain, and some corner is kept from your sight. When you are a father with your son, as you are, moments where you could look each other in the eye pop up and shut instantly. Your mission this autumn is to find a way to keep them open.

You’ve seen this as a place where life flows unselfconsciously in people and with lots of freedom and want that flow and freedom for your boy.

The present moment is reduced to a drip, a bare trickle, by the pressure of the future and the oppressive weight of the past. You want more for him—radiant, ecstatic overflowing. In your dream before the first trip to these lakes, you saw salmon excited by the flow. Their whole bodies leap clear, come clear of the water. This is the season song you want for him, in a perfect habitat shaped by flow and streambed.

Where there is a curve, a story will pour into it. There is a pike arched, in a gesture of offering, in your net. Hold him loosely, let the slow laminar flow of the future pool in him.

Pool in him like the poor salmon smolts caught in the hatcheries at the Shannon dam in Ardnacrusha.
Your dream of leaping salmon is coming a cropper right this minute 50 miles from here, funnelled through tiny pipes while the electricity company abstracts 97% of the river’s flow.

Electricity shivers the air before your eyes, crazing it like a dropped mirror in which a terrible fish is rising to meet a lost woman’s gaze. That fall, that answering rise play out before your eyes on an endless loop that feeds through the movement and rest of every single day. Trapped in a simile, like hatchlings at the weir, there’s no escape.

*

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*

Salmon on this island are bound unbreakably to wisdom, the kind you need no school for, just the accident of a burnt finger in the absence of the master whose catch you’re cooking. Fionn, who sucked wisdom in the form of fish-skin from his own burnt thumb, grew up to make Lough Neagh, hollowing it out in the act of flinging a clod at a rival giant. The skin of that lake’s water is crawling green now, choking itself to death. Its birds and fish are disappearing fast. Recreational anglers are warned by the Food Standards Agency to take care when handling and gutting fish to prevent the spread of microcystins from gut to edible flesh. Advice remains that recreational fishing should not take place in areas of visible algal bloom, and fish that are displaying abnormal behaviours, are dead or dying, should not be eaten.

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There is a pike arched, in a gesture of offering, in your net. The lines dangling from his lower lip tell you that he has weathered enormous struggle to survive to this moment of reckoning. But you push away that glimpse of history, fix on the lens of an eye lined up to flash seconds of the future at you.

You see green. You see an immense expanse of green leaking from the lake-side fields with their well-nourished dairy herds, to crawl all over the skin of the water.

Craiceann na h-uisce, as a poet will put it in Irish some 30 years from now, only for his translator to abstract the water’s skin into ‘the meniscus.’ As if you couldn’t say ‘water’s skin’ in English. As if you had to make it clear that this was the meniscus, built from surface tension, not the epidermis of a lake anthropomorphised through some limitations inherent in the older language.

As if that older language didn’t have its own science words—meinisceas, mar shampla—to call upon where needed. Someone translating thought the reader needed to be told that craiceann na h-uisce, the skin of the water, was in point of fact the meniscus. Someone thought the metaphor needed smoothing into science for the reader in the major language.

The language of science and the image from the older tongue speak into you as one. You see blue-green algae crawling over the skin of the lake, suffocating it like body-paint.

*

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*

Little rock lake—that Irish poem began—that the sea swept in on her waves and left behind. Many moments in that poem speak to moments in your own—fish struggling to sound out or even stay alive, their binding to school and tribe broken, the sun suffocating the little lake in which they’ve been cast away. Crisp images that will pop into existence after you’re gone flood you, daily rushes from the future—through the fish you glimpse a lyre-shaped lake to the north of here dying under cyanobacteria. The little rock lake, cut off from the sea and suffocating in the sun’s heat, could have sprung from one of your writing prompts for Sylvia. Except that where your exercise had fish tossed ashore for a moment, then recovered by the next wave this one has a little lake lost, never swept back up from among the rocks.

*

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*

It’s easy to retroactively make a story out of your own trajectory that makes some sort of sense

It’s rainbow season. An arc encloses the whole lake, and from the boat you can see its double breaking through in patches. The harpist-poet who wrote Fáinne Geal an Lae, the bright ring of morning, lies in the ruins of the new temple next to where you usually cast off. His resting place was unmarked in your time, but visible from here through the temple’s lintels, painted dazzling white by October light reflecting off the ruffled lake-skin.

It’s easy to retroactively make a metaphor for transparency from the skin of the water, but on days like this one its rucked up surface is only good for deflecting.

*

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*

A net of lines complicates the space between you and the drawn boy in the boat, pulls you in.
The wife of the maker of those lines wrote of the fucking reticence/ of the world but you have found the world, if anything, excessively forthcoming. Especially in the years since your death, you have felt it stripping enamel from your self until nothing but the nerves are left, vibrating like naked trees in autumn wind.

There is no way to be in solidarity against the world if we still want to exist within it, a pair of American sisters will write in 40 years or so, of the struggle to establish fellow-feeling with the planet’s animal and plant-life. Little will they know that existing within the world continues after death, meaning that solidarity is key to well-being in a posthumous half-life they are utterly unaware of, on their side of the lake.

My whole life I was swimming listening/ beside the daylight world wrote the poet of the reticent world. Listening.

 

Note on Sources
 
How complete and final…is from Ted Hughes’s fishing diaries quoted in Mark Wormald’s The Catch.
hold your temper loosely…is from ‘summerletter’ in callie gardner’s naturally it is not. This book thinks through questions that first arose in the reading of that book, and is in many ways a response to that single page, which also provides the closing lines of this book; do something with the sound is from ‘hand up to your ear’ in Fred Moten’s The Little Edges, and we live among comes from Deleuze’s first seminar of the Cinema 1: the movement-image course, in my translation.
Barrie Cooke’s pencil sketch is here https://www.whytes.ie/art/pike-fishing-self-and-ted-hughes-1980/179553/. As is clear from its title, it is Cooke himself accompanying Hughes in the boat. It was rewritten into Nick in my recollection of the image, after reading about Hughes’s trips to Lough Gur with Nick in The Catch. The couplets from Michael Hogan’s poem throughout Two Coopers in a red room… are quoted by Jim Kemmy in ‘Garadh Earl and the Two Coopers.’ Cathal Shannon’s description of Lough Gur was on ‘Newsbeat.’
Some things I remember… is from Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes. some relics are more eloquent… you’ve got to come over…this great prisoner-anchorite…on the verge of extinction… are from Mark Wormald’s ‘The Great Irish Pike: Lough Gur, a Cooke and three Hugheses.’ no feeling is final is from Rilke’s ‘Go to the Limits of your Longing.’
where life flows unselfconsciously…and excited by the flow…are from a letter from Ted Hughes, quoted in The Catch.  Advice remains that recreational fishing…is from Emily Cullen’s article on toxic algae in Lough Neagh.
Craiceann na h-uisce is from Eoin McEvoy’s poem ‘Lochán Carraige’ and ‘the meniscus’ is from Seán Lysaght’s translation ‘Rock Lake.’ fish tossed ashore for a moment, then recovered by the next wave is from David Trinidad’s poem ‘From Ted Hughes’ List of Suggested Writing Exercises for Sylvia Plath.’ It’s easy to retroactively…is Daniel Kennedy in an interview on translation with Tobias Ryan. the fucking reticence…is Jean Valentine’s ‘I came to you.’ There is no way to be in solidarity against the world if we still want to exist within it is Astra and Sunaura Taylor’s essay ‘Our Animals, Ourselves.’ My whole life…is from Jean Valentine’s ‘Listening.’

 

Sources

Ted Hughes, Fishing Diary (quoted in Mark Wormald, The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes)

callie gardner, naturally it is not

Gilles Deleuze; Smith, D. W.; Stivale, C. J. (2024). Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Lecture 1, 10 November 1981. (Version 2.0). Purdue University Research Repository. doi:10.4231/AQ3N-Z997

Fred Moten The Little Edges

Jim Kemmy, ‘Garadh Earl and the Two Coopers’ in Lough Gur & District Historical Society Journal

Cathal O’Shannon, ‘Newsbeat’, https://www.rte.ie/archives/2017/0120/846424-lough-gur-has-a-future/

Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes

Mark Wormald ‘The Great Irish Pike: Lough Gur, a Cooke, and Three Hughses’ in Lough Gur & District Historical Society Journal

Mark Wormald, The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes

Rainer Maria Rilke ‘Go to the Limits of your Longing’

Emily Cullen, ‘Lough Neagh: Toxic Algae Potentially Waking Again’ https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-68484425

Eoin McEvoy, ‘Lochán Carraige/ Rock Lake’ (trans. Seán Lysaght)

David Trinidad, ‘From Ted Hughes’ List of Suggested Writing Exercises for Sylvia Plath’

Tobias Ryan, ‘Yiddish Translators have to learn to read with their noses: an interview with Daniel Kennedy’ https://minorliteratures.com/2022/06/01/yiddish-translators-have-to-learn-to-read-with-their-noses-an-interview-with-daniel-kennedy-tobias-ryan/

Jean Valentine, ‘I came to you’

Astra and Sunaura Taylor, ‘Our Animals, Ourselves’ https://lux-magazine.com/article/our-animals-ourselves/

Jean Valentine, ‘Listening’

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Ellen Dillon is a poet and teacher from Limerick. Her latest book How complete + final the feeling as I lift its curve in the net is just out from Broken Sleep Books, and her collaborative photo-poem with Kit Fryatt, all things that are passing, will be published by Spite Press later this summer. She was shortlisted for the 2024 Prototype Prize for artists and writers working at the intersections of different forms, and was Arts Council Writer in Residence at University College Cork in 2025.