from Decadence: 7 — An Bonnán Buí

  A heron-like species, rare visitors, most recent records
          referring to winter months . . . very active at dusk.
                                                                 —Guide to Irish Birds

A sobering thought, the idea of you stretched there,

bittern, under a dark sky, your exposed bones

yellow too in a ditch among cold stones,

ice glittering everywhere on bog and river,

the whole unfortunate country frozen over

and your voice stilled by enforced sobriety —

a thought more wrenching than the fall of Troy

because more intimate; for we’d hear your shout

of delight from a pale patch of watery sunlight

out on the mud there as you took your first

drink of the day and now, destroyed by thirst,

you lie in brambles while the rats rotate.

I’d’ve broken the ice for you, given an inkling;

now, had I known it, we might both be drinking

and singing too; for ours is the same story.

Others have perished — heron, blackbird, thrushes —

and lie shivering like you under whin-bushes;

but I mourn only the bittern, withdrawn and solitary,

who used to carouse alone among the rushes

and sleep rough in the star-glimmering bog-drain.

It used to be, with characters like us,

they’d let us wander the roads in wind and rain

or lock us up and throw away the key —

but now they have a cure for these psychoses

as indeed they do for most social diseases

and, rich at last, we can forget our pain.

She says I’m done for if I drink again;

so now, relieved of dangerous stimuli,

as peace with my plastic bottle of H₂O

and the slack strings of insouciance, I sit

with bronze Kavanagh on his canal-bank seat

not in ‘the tremendous silence of mid-July’

but the fast bright zing of a winter afternoon

dizzy with head-set, flash-bulb and digifone,

to learn the tao he once claimed as his own

and share with him the moor-hen and the swan,

the thoughtless lyric of a cloud in the sky

and the play of light and shadow on the slow

commemorative waters; relax, go with the flow.

Source: Collected Poems (The Gallery Press, 2008)