Notes for a Player
For Denis Boothman
1
Towards the end you had hair made of moonlight.
Your sculptural face under moonlight.
October's incredible
new-minted radiance; Samhain's high moon of the spirits.
Too brilliant for winter.
White flare through the galloping mist.
Illumining Sugarloafs.
2
You knew everyday holy and worshipped.
You knew communion as sharing abundance.
You knew music as a possible sanctity.
You knew time was confounded by telling it slant.
You knew that worlds could return in the stories
you plucked from your phases and potted around.
3
As winter lacks
the Swallow’s chirp
she lacks awake
in early dark
your free-given melody, talk,
soothing her, lilting her up.
No lay from your shade now
but distant, anxious whispering
and she adrift
as leaf from oak unrooted yet
and shelter lost, security dissolved.
Shush now, shush and halt that bitter breath
like frost betongued that she may sleep,
sleep down and deep like a child on a quilt
in a summer of your warmth,
your blossoms softly calling.
You are the garden in her youth,
the Swallows in her longing.
4
Sunday in a nightgown at breakfast in Beech Grove/ Orsova LTD,
where you are growing/grow
in your family/family business, phar-pharfing
– phar-phar-phar-phar - peeling a mandarin orange,
stirring your cuppa – ceramic ding ding - humming along
to McCormack or Callas, tap-tapping shell – tap-tap again -
cracking open your ten AM free-range.
5
We wish you eternal
in Clifden in Summer,
Ashford in Autumn,
Dublin in Winter,
Venice in Spring.
5
In your after-dinner amphitheater
in Baile an Bhóthair,
under that suitably flickering small chandelier
you grant our Venetian wish,
charming each adult/child and
squishing them into the bowl of your telling
to dismiss their belief
in an unhappy ending with
a reel from your old Dublin Am-Dram
or of your stretch in the Saudian desert
squatting on rugs in marquees
in a moisture-less heat sampling falafel,
muttabaq, baklava,
swatting the flies
with your wedding-ringed hand.
6
Backwards diving in the fashionable baths;
biking from Blackrock to horse-thronged Killarney
in the ration of your youth. Catholic glamour.
An Emergency beatnik in my mind, observing tenderness,
order and piety all roads of your life
like Kerouac sober forever on the way to Big Sur.
7
As if in pre-production, rehearsals,
as if only warming backstage of a five act
awaiting the usher's announcements;
as if only plotting with wrinkled OS
and biros the next epic hike.
8
I admire you brightly then, your glorious,
your tall last stand, Geronimo against oblivion.
9
Minister of fleshandblood wordlaw, transubstance
of family tale. Serenely bequeathing your memory's will.
Sharable story your pricelessly ultimate offspring.
10
Stories mobile, well-flexed and intent
as those strong Kerry horses, cantering
along in the dapplement, untroubled in canopy dark,
steadily guiding their carriage, so weighty,
so precious, of an almost innocent love
and endlessly fresh-sworn bethrothment
around and around in the honeymoon waterfall park.
11
I knew that I was witness,
for the first time in history,
to the Standard of a Father
who is dying.
12
Climbed like a pilot your final ascent,
hauled on and drew deep through
all that uphill heft and atmospheric tapering
of skyward days, unembarrassed
by the thirty-foot transparent tubing
taped to your rock-baldy, onetime thicketed upper lip,
splitting there into your nostrils
and piping the dregs of your life,
a tentacle curling-uncurling obscenely behind you,
a deathspun silk, as you slouchingly, wheezingly,
determinedly tread forwards and backwards
from kitchen/dining to a terminal
cabin-bed at the farther and farther corridor end,
attached under orders to a 3ft high air machine
which 24/7 was dependably fanning and purring
along to your rear like your star-cruiser's idolising
second mechanick or a robot butler
on your private submarine.
13
Windows and mirrors must be hateful to the dying
who catch themselves paling away in the flashing
at parties, or see their own absence from next vacation's
photographs in the clinking of their hospice birthday glass
of Vino Rosso. Melancholy wisp-smile of those fitting on ghostliness.
Temptation to morphine pump yourself down into
the swallowhole of your own nothingness.
Seeing right through yourself. Your own transparence.
Acquarium torso of finned heart, sawtoothed organs.
14
Yet you did not shrink from your blankening image
but flared into a magnified, mesmeric presence,
astounding all who gathered to your final stage,
com un plenilunio, violet and pink and enormous,
burning up space over Dalkey, Bull Harbour, Sandymount Strand,
astonishing lovers and traffic, the day before waning.
15
Stage direction for the tragiparody called
'drawn-out-death': If drizzle on
our midnight scenery's unavoidable,
let it be rose-petal-showering
and let there be pulsing of moonbows as well.
15
You have faults that you never become.
You become what is good in your gift.
Your grudges dissolve in a handshake;
your sorrows in joys you distribute like mints.
16
In Padua some mornings you are whistling Puccini,
but in the long afternoons of oppressive humidity
death is an art-thief scaling your throat
intent on your tongue, intent on your singing.
17
Enter and stand operatic and floodlit
on the last of your balconies,
arms stretched overhead,
palms out, wiggling your rheumatic tips,
antennae of the opiate warmth,
divining the evening's delight,
channeling what beams you receive
to the milling piazza
beneath, winnowing...
...electing the grain of a grandchild
who adores you like ten thousand birthdays,
like dicky-bowed Christmas unwrapping always.
Gifting a lovebright identity.
Raising from the mass her individual face.
I bless this like a miracle.
I annoint it like the meaning of a saint.
18
Now she'll adore like us all in meandering dreams
your true-mooring light, moon-in-retreat
reborn as a wandering star in the grand inner flight.