THE HANDSTAND

june 2005


fred johnston, poet

FOR FRANCIS O’HARA

In San Remo the traffic is delirious,

The mountains open their hands,

So we go up, breathing the car into

Precarious turns, the sea like a failed

Parachute dragging down behind us,

The air rusty with low cloud, houses

Tacked to one slope and then another:

A mechanic in the green dark of a

Shed wipes his hands on a spotted rag,

Old men on Roman bridges gnarling

Small talk, watching, curious as we are

At what new thing passes them by –

Our road folds upon itself outside

A church whose doors are locked against

The sun; below us, when we step out,

The valley is an axe-blow, the sea a blade.

FRED JOHNSTON.©

*****************

THE LIGHTHOUSE BUYER

He sought the certainty of water,

The distance water made between

One shore and the next,

This rat-thick island, wrecked keeper’s house

And a blind light long gone out.

He longed to row there on days

When no distance was far enough:

He would go out on some pretext

Or other culled from a lifetime of making things up,

Bring with him sandwiches, a flask, a plastic cup.

All to put the ocean in front of him,

Wide, curved, blue and hopelessly

Indifferent, what land there was

Under him like an unsteady raft, the lighthouse a mast

And himself the sail, filling, flailing, tied fast.

The island stayed beyond him,

More than his reach, out-distancing him

Moving under its own will

Without help from him or any part of him –

One day he looked and the lighthouse was gone.

Big machines crossed a man-built ford,

Bragging in coughy voices they levelled it:

What dreaming there was they put an end to brutally:

Like a gaoler shaking a condemned man awake

They opened his eyes and watched his heart break.

Or so it seemed to him, dog and all

Strolling the Sunday prom with a view of the hills:

Where the lighthouse had been

Was a sewerage plant shining like God’s seraphim

Pumps and other engines singing on the water like a hymn.

FRED JOHNSTON©.

*****************

AT THE BUS SHELTER

Cold wind and rain on the ‘bus-shelter,

Wind-blow and rain-rap on the roof.

Light and aloneness in the bus-shelter,

It is late, night falls, there’s a wet bench

A street light, grey road, dripping rain.

And . . . a huge perspex-faced photo of a street, rain,

Everything in it dark as midnight, a perfect place to write:

Every man is entitled to a roof over his head.

How much was spent on this poster-street in its rain,

                                                A street without a shelter? 


SAMAINE BOUINOU (Trans. Fred Johnston)

{Sous l’abri Bus appears in Semaine Bouinou’s collection, ‘Poésie Libre,’,   published by Éditions des Écrivains, Paris, 2003. With my thanks to Éditions des Écrivains for permission to translate and publish}


NOTES FROM A NIGHT CAFÉ                  BY FRED JOHNSTON

I know that the pomegranate has a hollow centre shaped like a star with five points. I understand, with benefit of hindsight, that the friendship you offered was the hollow sacred significance of that star. Today I saw you three times in the street; the city is brilliant with flags, pennants snap raucously over the river, stone angels rattle on the carved stairways of counting-houses. Each time but the last we exchanged the loud mellow courtesies; that last time my hand rested in the hand of another woman, you crossed the street without pretending not to see me. A sign? Embarrassment? Contempt? You were a bird preparing to smother herself in the feathers of folded wings. Perhaps I am mistaken. But the flame of your stammered glance ignited old hopes, old anxieties. But how old are these hopes, these fears? Perhaps not quite old enough: my thoughts raced to a place where I might, once again, take up a pen and upon hand-made notepaper scrawl mean verses of adoration to you.

                                                    ********************

This morning, when you were not even a memory, a letter arrived from a friend in Spain. Imperfect English; but there was a unity transmitted through the pages that transcended language. With deadly care he must have written each incorrect phrase, constructed each incongruous line, in order simply to express a tenderness of feeling, which I might take up and recognise. He writes of ordinary horrors, of simplistic pleasures that numb the mind. He takes me out of the dead real world of this ragged apartment – in which dead loves are maturing like pods of harmful seeds preparing to burst – into the imaginary, desired world or orange trees and railings of balconies under the sun. His letter is the most direct and orchestrated act of love and is magical.

                                                    *********************

Four of us, two men, two women, perched neatly at a round table by a window overlooking the street; it is William’s birthday. And in a few days he intends to leave us, the city, our lives, stretching into the wider territories of the known and unknown world, to attempt to alter his perception of reality – impossible, to us. So the gathering – such things as a birthday cake have been arranged with the management – is both mournful and celebratory. Pizza and strong coffee; Margaret, older than the rest of us, calm, bespectacled, framed in the window, listening, talking, with equal strength; beside me, on my right hand, having taken photographs of us all, sits Lucy. She is American. She and I are together, as they say. The atmosphere in the café as darkness falls in the street is peppered with sharp candlelight and loud Rock-music. Conversation is difficult. But it is a friendly place, there is the reassuring odour of food cooking and the walls and general décor remind me of places like it in Paris and Madrid, where I have been and when I have been in a similar mood of receptive comfort. Eating slowly, the discussion comes with ease to writing and what William’s hopes are – he wants to be a writer and this self-imposed exile to a building-site in England is, he believes, part of his writerly progress towards the novel he will write, he assures us, whose central theme is an old love-affair. I cannot tell him that, if he insists upon writing about old love affairs, he will be writing the same novel for the rest of his life. My photograph has appeared in a local newspaper; I am steeped in a mild local artistic controversy that will not shake, even tickle, the world beyond the two or three intersecting streets around us. Margaret says my reported statements were too mild; Lucy has already said this. I begin to believe it, acknowledging a muted fear of attaching anyone or anything, even in my own defence. I am terrified always by thoughts of possible reprisals! Bogeys, of course, bur real to me. William maintains that he would not like to be famous to the point where he was recognised in the street. Margaret laughs and wipes her eyes with a table-napkin. Lucy is leaving me; perhaps not this evening or tomorrow. But I will put her on a ‘plane for the United States in the near future and the prospect lends me bad dreams. Of this I do not, dare not, speak. It is too real, too solid to interpose itself in this back-and-forth banter regarding uncertainties and pliable possibilities. Instead, we sentimentalise about dead writers and criticise those who are still living. Céline, William declares, is the greatest writer in two thousand years; before him, well, we had some decent cave-artists. We laugh. Beneath the table I place my hand affectionately on Lucy’s knee, a gesture at once futile and desperate, not meant to console her but to console me. She is studying us and listening to our conversation with the deep concentration of an inveterate note-taker. If I am in love with her, then I must also be in love with the hopelessness of our predicament, and I am not in love with that. The birthday-cake is brought down to the table; candles fashioned so that they cannot be blown out. This little window-table has already been consecrated as a place – an altar – at which I will one day mourn in angry solitude the absence of Lucy. There are many such altars in a life, and of our own haphazard constructing. The food has made me tired; William has one glass of red wine. No one is smoking, which signifies something. It is dark outside now. Winter. We walk up the street in scattery conversational mode, the wind from the Atlantic tastes of rain; the student bars are noisy and smoky. I am too old, I tell myself, to be feeling as hopeless as I do. William is gesticulating, talking about what an artist, what a writer, should not be. We live, I am beginning to understand, in a world of leave-takers, goodbye-people. For myself, no amount of moving brings freedom.

                                                *******************

..

.I sometimes feel that Lucy stays with me because she knows so few other people in this city; roses, wilting in dry jars, symbolise this thinking. Old women begging in alleys also symbolise it. My nerves cannot endure the feeling that accompanies it. I am reduced to livid hypochondria and anxiety. I crave love and get paid, or pay myself, in the sick taste of tobacco on the tongue. We stroll up the main street, dark now, William and Margaret gone, and suddenly she takes my hand as she has not bothered to do all evening. I am aware of her need of silence and the slow inspection of shoe-shop windows. At the corner of my eye, you appear, long-skirted, alone also, bearing down on us with your patient, easy stride, full of grace and poignance. It is when you are fewer than twenty yards away that you cross the street. But the Square is full of the smell of roses and the air is suddenly still and warm. You were an omen to me once. Lucy knows about you. I make an undiplomatic and silly joke of your having crossed the street; the joke leers into itself, you have disappeared. How can I explain that you were probably not there at all?

                                                  ********************

We drink in a bar decorated with high-backed chairs, which might have come from a workshop of William Morris. Stitched scenes of prancing maidens, pregnant orchards, young men in Mediaeval costume, leaping hounds, baskets of apples. On the bar floor, an electronic game operated by the insertion of coins; over it, a stained-glass window shaped like the window of a church and containing coloured pieces of glass. Wooden roof-beams and couches that look suitably hard and pre-Raphaelite. What has happened here? What crazy miracle occurred within the imagination of the proprietor that he dared impose such things on the local drinkers, silent men, querrellous watchers of pub TVs? In the street, a crowd of drunken youths shout and sing out of the warmish night – there are sudden nights like this even at this turn towards winter. They are, like blushes, not to be trusted. Stars glint shyly from behind fast fat clouds. Lucy looks at the young men and says “Probably Harry’s friends,” mentioning a name I have never heard before in my time with her. All this naked, fluctuating uncertainty that is Lucy and I contends with the cherished memory of you, not in a street flittering by, but pressed timidly against my own timidity in the doorway of your apartment, our mouths new to one another.

The dislocated phrases of shouting and singing carry on up the street and dissolve.

                                                                                   Fred Johnston© (1989/2005)


- Fred Johnston in front of Galway's Fishery Tower Museum, on the Corrib - photo press release: 
"What we lack in funding we make up for in imagination," says Fred Johnston, manager of the Western Writers' Centre, which, having been refused Arts Council funding six times in a row, continues to create innovative projects. The most recent one brought on board the collaboration of Galway Civic Trust and the well-known Galway Writers' Workshop and Crannóg literary magazine, to produce a series of lunchtimes each Wednesday in the month of June at the old Fishery Tower Museum on Wolfe Tone Bridge on the Corrib River, starting at 1,05pm, admission a nominal €2. No fewer than ten writers, some of them very well known, will take part. "I must congratulate wholeheartedly the openness of Galway Civic Trust to the idea of staging poetry readings at the Tower. They were great. Sandra Bunting at the Workshop was terrific. There was real energy behind this. It's another 'first' for the Western Writers' Centre - we already have been first to put a writer in residence in place in a Galway hospital, first with putting local poetry on 'buses, first to create writers' courses in situ in workplace. We also run a literary page with Galway Now magazine. None of this impresses the Arts Council. Imagination is sometimes more of a threat to some people in the arts' world than money." The only writers' centre West of the Shannon, they are supported by Galway City and County Councils, the Ireland Funds, Lohans of Galway, Poetry Ireland, The Irish Writers' Centre and Udaras na Gaeltachta and Easons Books, and Charlie Byrne's Bookshop, Galway. Details of readings, courses and events from westernwriters@eircom.net or (091) 533595, or visit the Website, which hosts two free pages for prose and poetry, at www.twwc.ie

 
FRED JOHNSTON,1, Carn Ard,

Circular Road,Galway,

Rep. of  Ireland.(091)526915 (087)2178138

e:mail(s) sylfredcar@iolfree.ie

FredJohnston_52@hotmail.com

Born 1951 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Educated there and Toronto, Canada. Lived for a time in Spain and Algeria. Attended St. Malachy's College, Belfast and Cregagh Technical College, Belfast. Moved to Dublin in 1968 and Galway in 1976. Has read frequently here and in France, including the universities of Toulouse and Poitiers; at Poitiers, he delivered a paper on contemporary Irish literature North and South, 1969 – Present. Has delivered papers elsewhere, including to the John Hewitt School, Armagh, Northern Ireland, on the relationship between Irish writers and politics in our time (July 2003). Writers’ Residency at the Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco, September-October, (2004) funded by the Ireland Fund for Monaco.