Let Us Fly Away To The Famed Cities Of Asia
ad claras asiae volemus urbes
– Catullus 46
A mini Manhattan of rusted corrugated roofs
settling in to the sixth storey of a recently
red raw apartment. No longer the sole occupants
of the building which was eerie in evenings
despite days – seven days a week – of building site
aural accompaniment. That too is dying down,
in so far as noise in this neck of the woods
ever dies down. We live with drills and the thuds
of lump-hammers on ceilings, we breakfast
to angle-grinders slicing in the landing
of a Sunday morning while everything
is being built, dismantled and demolished
by hand and carted out in bamboo baskets
on people’s heads through long corridors of dust.
No one ever complains, it’s part of the old city
disappearing and the new one rising, refashioning
in front of our eyes to the ambient and atonal
music of construction. Our kitchen faces east
and each evening a clockwork sun drops
with southern hemisphere promptness
behind sprouting new high-rises on the horizon
breaking the sun’s fall by seconds.
Home, a citadel of sorts with 180-degree views
of the neighbourhood; high-density living on one side
and on the other, an auspicious view of the golden stupa
of the Shewdagon, whose bricks, under its thickening
skin of gold, were laid; one layer by men by day
and one layer by celestials at night.
Across the narrow canyon, cross-sections of lives
and where it not for street noise and language
we could almost lean out and converse.
Sometimes, a house phone rings
in the evening, so audible,
it could be in our own apartment.
I see someone move to answer it and later
the unfurling of bedrolls on polished parquet
floors which in this high heat, incenses rooms
with the tang of teak. Our two-year-old daughter
abed and under a muslin dome for mosquitoes,
asks that her bedtime story, ‘has a garden in it’
and later, ‘where’s home’, as I direct the fan
to her soon sleeping form.
She loves the gekko who moved in ahead of us,
clicking loudly at night like a wren in a hedge
at home and we are glad of its industry. Evenings
fill with new noises, honking geese in an alleyway
below, kept to keep snakes away. Demonic
crows gathering on the gigantic and shedding cotton
tree at dusk and then seasonally, choruses of frogs
grunting then squawking like birds and cicadas
whose shrill rises to our level at the point
you can hardly hear yourself. Nights of wakefulness,
drawn from bed to the drone of a monk reciting sutras
through a tannoy all night, and peering through the kitchen
window to find another, golden pagoda, many miles
away, ethereally illumed by a roseate half-moon.
Distant pariah dogs howling, gathering into packs
to roam through compliant streets. The night train’s
dying concertina note to Mawlamyine or Mandalay
and times when I’ve lain awake, waiting
for the affirmation or release of the soft-gong
of our nearest monastery at 4.30 a.m. or the downtown
mosque’s muffled call to prayer. Once, called to the kitchen
to find the room throbbing with the hum of boat engines
on the Yangon river, a sound that only occasionally
reached us having travelled through the empty boulevards,
at dawn, before the early caterwauls of street sellers
and breakfasts arriving on the backs of bikes,
from boiled pulses to parathas delivered to your door
or sometimes attached to a coloured nylon cord.
Coloured cords which dangle from every balcony
primed with a crocodile clip on one end
or a basket in which to haul up the matter
of the whole world; newspapers, mangoes,
laundry and lottery tickets like pinned butterflies
go up while money and letters are lowered down.
And if all else fails, simply step out and clap,
someone will brave the steep stairs and appear
at your door as if by magic. Already the heat is up,
not that it dropped much during the night,
and leaving the air-conditioned citadel
is to dip your toe into the cauldron and chaos.
Heat entraps and like Shelley’s worm, dissipates
and dissuades you from setting out.
All day scrutiny of the sun, someday we’ll exchange
this heat for the cold, wind and rain,
our daughter pines for and wish it all back again,
disillusioned by the eternally false promises of our own.
Right now, a monotony of washed blue skies and water
in the cold tap that can scald by noon.
At street level, a woman walks ahead with a tin basin balanced
on her head, fish tails and chicken feet, imploring the sky
with some fish and fowl riddle.
Late afternoon, noise abated, my daughter calls me
to the living room and the faint tinkling of a bell
which neither of us can find. Too soft for the monastery,
then overhead, glass lozenges in the garish Chinese chandelier
shake and make music to the latest earth tremor.
Poetry Ireland Review Issue 121:
Eavan Boland's first issue as editor of Poetry Ireland Review aims to encourage a conversation about poetry which is 'noisy and fractious certainly ... but a conversation nevertheless that can be thrilling in its reach and commitment'. There are new poems from Thomas McCarthy, Jean Bleakney, Wendy Holborow, Paul Perry, Aifric Mac Aodha, and many others, while the issue also includes work from Brigit Pegeen Kelly, with an accompanying essay on the poet by Eavan Boland. Eavan Boland also offers an introduction to the work of poet Solmaz Sharif, while there are reviews of the latest books from Simon Armitage, Peter Sirr, Lo Kwa Mei-en, and Vona Groarke, among others. PIR 121 also includes Theo Dorgan's elegiac tribute to his friend John Montague – a canonical poet, in contrast to the emerging poets Susannah Dickey, Conor Cleary and Majella Kelly, who contribute new work and will also read for the Poetry Ireland Introductions series as part of ILFD 2017.