Words and Music, poems by Fred Johnston

Fred Johnston is the author of nine collections of poetry, the latest being Rogue States published by Salmon, 2018. He is the founder of Cúirt, Galway city’s annual literary festival, the city where he currently teaches Creative Writing at NUI Galway. He is also the author of three novels and two collections of short stories, he is currently working on his third collection. He has very strong links to France, having written many times in French and having also translated from the French. He won a Prix de L’Ambassade for his translations in 2004.

Words and Music

i.m. Ciaran Carson, poet, 1948 - 2019

It’s all in the breath - Your airs drew words along, or seemed to, Staves of street upon street Over the derelict spaces The dialects of a many-musicked people Ghettoed by gantries, tight bricky terraces Pubs where it’s prudent to Weather-eye the door, listen for an engine revving up The feather-light tick of the out-of-place – You had the right words In the right order, as the diktat goes, and so could Put words and music in their proper place Now and then let them scatter Off the leash, they’d dander where the weather’d Take them, in and out the badlands Muttering murderous roads punctuated By black taxis, back home through the radio-squelch Of Army checkpoints. Still, you held the long note, Had the last word.

The Roman bridge at Callac

Then in Brittany On the Roman bridge at Callac Sensing the railway, its single coach Trailing beyond the trees and highway And the Square limping, leaning The stone soldier Mort pour La Patrie The patient silence of a ragged belfry

To buy lilies by the Café de la Place Order coffee in French from The pretty Welsh wife at the bar Sit at a rickety table and watch Circus posters bloom on the walls Like fat urgent flowers, Small urgent women gossiping for hours To be arriving off the ferry Feeling sumptuous sun through The windscreen, taking the first Rond-point slow and cautious, Accelerating on more open road, Gliding without maps to a diesel beat Lapping like a lover at the salted heat.

Between Zero and One

Cyber-space is an empty frame - We’re drawing letters, whole

Words, phrases, in that lack, Declaring ourselves by electronic

Innuendo or appearing to, ciphering And decoding, hemmed in, Cornered by the heart’s pulses to The finger-tips, the what-not-to-say Beating like a spacer on the screen Of ourselves, the digitalised longing

Pressing on the Delete button – What can I save you as? There is no folder secure enough We are not Password Protected.

The Gecko

There were spaces in the day best occupied With walking in the sand-brewed garden under Clacking palm trees whose leaves were sharp as blades A place to rattle the unswept cage of your head Once the rains went and there was undying heat And there was so much to discuss with the empty Benches and the dried-up fountain With the trains humping and loud as lovers Over in the sidings under the grain silos Far enough away for privacy, their intimate couplings The dumbfounded gecko, Tarentola neglecta, Scuttering along a wall of broken stones –This before the bombs came and the atrocities And the throats slit in ambushed villages; before A heresy of hanged men among orange trees And the unsafe safety of locked doors; I read of it Tucked safely in a demoralising pub under Irish rain Left most utterly to my own devices Most of which acquired a habit of exploding in my face; I had never known ageing men so unexplored, so Foul-mouthed, foolish and frantic Gecko-jittery and smoke-choked and angry when the sun Came out and the street glistered like blown-out glass Light sharp as blades, the no-sound of their catastrophe.

© Fred Johnston