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FRED JOHNSTON

Fred Johnston was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1951, educated there and in Toronto, Canada. Novelist, poet and critic, he was Writer-in-Residence at the Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco, in the Autumn of 2004. He is the founder of Galway's annual literature festival, Cúirt and of its writers' centre and translates contemporary French poetry. He lives and works in Galway, on Ireland's West coast.

JOSEPH BEUYS - DISCUSSION

“There is nothing to say about Art,

just as there is nothing to say about God.”

Henriette Patin (1834 -1887): Letters

Back-lit by what light the hallway gives,

We’re letters of the alphabet inverted,

Or pencil-shading on yellow paper, or the sea.

A possibility of four forms scratched

On a pallid surface with shapes of books

Imagined on a wall. A chalk-on-slate scrawl.

Black garden sharding into bits of light,

Hair running like oil over a blank page,

The many faces of your face.

WRAPPING

"For instance, Siculus Pontius was afraid to appear in public

unless wrapped, virtually head to foot, in his thickest

toga. Yet if he were trying to hide, he had made himself

the most stared-upon figure in Rome . . . .”

- Gaius Tuteis: ‘On Explanation, bk.IV’

The wind is like a second skin wrapping

The postman sheltering at our door,

And we won’t open it, amazed at the way

His body is shaped by his coat, his face

Sparkling with bleeds of rain, and the gasp

On his lips, a plea, not to be left to drown

Or breathe his last while two faces stare at him

Through the thin glass, as if he were no longer human.

HE THINKS OF WINDOWS

- Sun stancu de balá

De rid’e de giugá.

- Paulette Cherici-Porello: E Viva Sciaratu – (Monégasque)

He thinks of windows flying in the blue heat

A room that flies, the sound and breath of a wing

Beating in the tremulous air, coffee sweet

And first-thing,

Sipped standing on his own terrace in bare feet.

From the ‘bus which stops, it seems, for everyone

He has a view of a sea without end. A gate,

A plate left out on a garden wall, a white sun

Lightly powdering

A sky as brutal and unnerving as a gun.

He has photographed the silly flap of palms,

And tasted something local, meaty, hot

Played at spotting girls like lovely psalms

That rolled along the eye,

Line on line, languid as traffic-jams.

He saw the great battalions of his thought

Roll dead in ditches, slaughtered by the heart.

He was himself and himself distraught,

(And now the ‘bus drifts off), as if

Some barefoot god had split him

With a promise or a gift: or worse,

Thrown him a purse of hope

Which he’d seen fall, but hadn’t caught.