Aidan Higgins plies me with gin and I read for him. Teamwork. I sit in the more comfortable chair. Aidan, with his failing eyesight, tries to stare into the middle-distance can perhaps make out a glimmer of light at the tunnel's end. He listens intently to his own uncompromising words flowing from my mouth. Balcony of Europe. Drinks with the dastardly baron. Martin Bormann slinks in and out of the room, savage and stealthy. I hear Alannah return and close the door downstairs. I take a swig of gin and embark upon the retelling of Aidan's first, fated marriage. It crumbles before my eyes. Aidan breathes heavily beside me and Alannah tiptoes into the room. Infidelity is recounted in painful detail. Love. It stings.
We talk together afterwards, clear the air. Banville, McGahern, Trevor, Mahon. Derek's mother called him an oddity. Said when he was little he wanted to be an aeroplane. She'd watch him from a window, running around the garden arms outstretched. Aidan and Alannah recall a reading in Toronto where he did the same thing as he read, taking off beneath the bright lights.
About Me
- enjambement
- I was born in England but moved to Ireland in 1990. This blog is a project centred on publishing at least one poem a week for a year.
3 comments:
"...with his failing eyesight, tries to stare into the middle-distance can perhaps make out a glimmer of light at the tunnel's end."
This image resonates. I like.
The whole of it brings back collegiate memories; the smell of books in an old house, the professor's study, jelly jars of gin and tonic with a twist of lime.
Hi lu,
Thanks for that. Like your memory of "jelly jars of gin and tonic with a twist of lime".
I drank delicious sweet Malaga wine the other night. It was made by an old man using oak barrels, bottled in cheap plastic bottles and smuggled over from Spain.
Beats a glass of "Tang" all to hell.
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