Photo by Fiona Green
Dear Bill
i.m. William Keys
Dear Bill: I’m sorry to hear you’re dead.
You hated the fig-leaf euphemisms
Of pulpit-jockeys who peddle heavens,
So you’d like me calling this spade a spade:
I died a bit myself, when I heard.
I’ve sobered up and dried my tears,
But I can’t break the habit of thirty years
Of talking to you inside my head.
I was writing to answer your latest card,
But your heart gave out before I could send
My latest home-thoughts. So I have to pretend
You’re still wide-awake and listening hard,
The way you’ve listened since ‘Sixty-Eight,
When we first talked Lowell and Rilke all night
Along the towpath of the Forth-and-Clyde.
I want to thank you, even if it’s late,
For keeping your door on the latch back then —
For lending an ear whenever I knocked,
For pouring a dram, and letting me talk;
For sending me home with an itch for the pen.
They used to take us for father and son,
But we parsed each other’s poems and woes
Like brothers, in love with the same cold Muse.
I’d started early, and you’d grown young,
And we met somewhere in the middle of the wood.
On the raw new roads of that housing-scheme
Where chance made us neighbours, you became
My ballast as well as my sounding-board,
When you mapped the mines of your own despair.
In the slag-dark shadow of the Meiklehill bing,
Where the snow-white Fell-wind scoured our lungs,
You’d cough and rake your long grey hair
And speak of Seville, where you’d bloomed to the full
In the light of Lorca. It was Spain that first
Opened your ears, and woke your thirst
For duende, fruit of a blood-stained soil;
And the Andalusian fire still glowed
In your hungry glare, when you cleared my path.
I took my bearings from your gravid laugh,
That rumbled like a tram on the Springburn Road.
If that’s all water under the bridge,
It’s the moss-green water of Kirkintilloch,
That’s stood stock-still since they sealed the locks.
Not much has moved, out there on the edge,
Besides your simmering rage, and the kids
Who roam the scheme at night, half-smashed,
Spraying war-paint on your pebble-dash,
Thowing up lager on your privet-hedge:
The same lost souls who consumed your breath
In the chalk-thick air for all those years,
Drumming Macbeth into small deaf ears.
You spent your wit and kept your faith,
Till wasting words for the love of words
Broke your health and half your heart.
It thickened the fog between life and art.
It choked your lungs until poetry hurt,
And you woke in the chest-ward, wired to tubes
Like an astronaut, in a grave-like space –
Like your coal-grimed father, hacking the face.
And you said you’d dreamed of your childhood –
Of an orange you’d won at a Sunday School,
That stood for all the light of Spain
Among the middens, in a Blitz-black lane:
A windfall-fruit from heaven, in hell.
Last time we met, you were worrying death
Like a gruff dog gnawing a meatless bone:
‘You can measure your life as short or long,
But it’s depth that counts,’ you said. ‘It’s depth…’
And your Spanish guitar with its missing strings,
Propped in a corner, coated with dust,
Echoed your talk like a captious ghost
As you poured one malt, and watched me drink.
Hooked to your fixes of oxygen,
Forbidden to fly, you were grounded between
The pension-queue and the bowling-green.
But you breathed more freely, just talking of Spain,
And I wished I could give you the Guadalimar
And its sun, like an orange falling to earth.
I wish you adios, Bill. I wish you breath.
I wish you sunlight, wherever you are.
GERALD MANGAN is a Scottish poet, playwright, journalist and illustrator. His collections include Waiting for the Storm (Bloodaxe Books, Scottish Arts Council Book Award), and his stage-plays include Crying Wolf (Communicado Theatre). He is a former writer-in-residence at Dundee College of Art and at Theatre Workshop in Edinburgh, where he also worked as an actor, designer and musician. He has been a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, a cartoonist for Le Monde, and a correspondent for the French Service of Radio Canada. He recently returned to live in his native Glasgow, after many years in Ireland and France, and he is currently completing a prose memoir, One Bed This Night, whose chapters have been appearing in Cyphers, The Dark Horse and Parnassus (New York).
Read more by Gerald Mangan
Artwork at the National Galleries of Scotland
Book reviews and essays in the Times Literary Supplement