fred johnston, poet
FOR FRANCIS
OHARA
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 keepers 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 Gods 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,
theres 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 labri Bus appears in
Semaine Bouinous 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 Williams
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
Williams 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 Lucys 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 Harrys 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.
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