Derek Mahon:

Night Thoughts

One striking post-war phenomenon has been the transformation of numerous countries into pseudo-places whose function is simply to entice tourists.

– Paul Fussel, Abroad

Night thoughts are best, the ones that visit us

where we lie smoking between three and four

before the first bird and the first tour bus.

Once you would wake up shaking at this hour

but now, this morning, you are a child once more

wide-eyed in an attic room behind the shore

at some generic, gull-pierced seaside town

in war-time Co. Antrim or Co. Down –

navies aglow off Bangor and Whitehead,

dark sea, Glenn Miller’s ‘Moonlight Serenade’,

huge transport planes thundering overhead.

Each white shoe you can remember, each stair-rod,

each streaming window on the Shore Road,

a seaside golf-links on a summer night,

pale sand-dunes stretching away in the moonlight,

‘the unbroken crescent of a sandy beach’.

A generation on, these things are here again

while a horse-drawn cab out of the past goes past

toward Leeson St. Night thoughts are best and worst.

My attic window under the shining slates

where the maids slept in the days of Wilde and Yeats

sees crane-light where McAlpine’s fusiliers,

site hats and brick-dust, ruin the work of years.

The place a Georgian theme-park for the tourist,

not much remains; though still the first of dawn

whitens a locked park, lilac and hawthorn

dripping in wintry peace, a secret garden

absorbed since the end of summer in its own

patient existence, sea-mist under the trees:

‘Wet seats now, water-logged cobwebs everywhere;

believe me, it’s all over till next year.’

Soon crocus, daffodil, primrose, the wild bruise

in the iris’ eye, and the full watery rose,

those luminous, rain-washed April mornings when

beneath wrought-iron balconies throng the square.

Even in the bathroom I hear them shouting out there –

aliens, space invaders clicking at the front door,

goofy in baseball caps and nylon leisurewear.

... Sententious solitude, ancient memory, night

and silence, nobody here; but even as I night-write

blind in a bedside notebook, ‘impersonal moonlight

audible on steps, railings, sash window and fanlight’,

my biro breaks the silence and something stirs.

Never mind the new world order and the bus tours,

you can still switch on the fire, kick off your shoes

and read the symbolists as the season dies:

Now for the coughing in school dormitories,

the hot drink far from home. November brings

statistics, albums, cocoa, medicine, dreams,

windows flung wide on briny balconies

above an ocean of roofs and lighthouse beams;

like a storm lantern the wintry planet swings.