Mary O'Malley is an award-winning poet, born and living in Ireland.
Bursary Windows
I hate November. It drags me down, as if into some cave or grave. I fear the fading of the light and begin counting the days until the solstice and the earth will start to tilt slowly towards the light. In Irish the month of November is called Samhain and was also known as Mi na Marbh – the month of the dead. The Mexicans have the Day of the Dead or All Souls but we get a whole month out of it. That’s not the part I find depressing. Far from it. The notion that the realm of the dead is closer now than at any other time of year is comforting. I go to the graves, and sit for a while, and feel better for it. It’s not that I think my people are there. I suspect they are distant pulses of energy, atoms dispersed somewhere among the stars, much as the Greeks believed of their misbehaving goddesses, who were hung or chained to punish or reward.
Mairtin O Cadhain’s novel ‘Cre na Cille’ sees this differently. In our mythology, the dead go on misbehaving just as in life. They are jealous, foul-mouthed and petty, or generous, comically pedantic or, petty as they sit in the graveyard talking, telling tales and stories, waiting for news of ‘above’ as a newly dead soul enters. Yet they can never go back, and the tragedy of the heroine, Caitriona Phaidin, a boastful shrew of a woman, is that her husband never puts up the ostentatious headstone she craves as proof of his love.
No, it is not the dead that bother me in November but the dark. My house is built on a hill. From the bedroom, I can look out over the visible stretches of the Corrib, so vast I can pretend it’s the sea. Beyond is Cnoc Maigh, with a Cairn on top where Ceassair, who came here after the Flood with fifty three women and three men, is buried. She was Noah’s granddaughter and came for the first ‘taking of Ireland’ in case you’re wondering.
Look out another window and I see prehistoric mounds. More graves. Beyond that hill is the invisible sea. It’s enough to make you feel sorry for the Greeks. All those ancestors and ruins. And bankers who should have been nailed to the sky as warnings.
Normally I cope with Winter by the simple expedient of getting out. ‘Airport’ a voice in my head shouts gleefully and I obey and make for Paris or Malaga or Barcelona. A city, the bigger the better, is the antidote.
This year I’m stuck. There are compensations. You could, I know, be marooned in worse places and I love my house. It has seven velux windows in the roof, purchases made when I got a bursary after my third book of poems. The builder pointed out that that was a lot of windows for a modest house – it might fall down, blow away, attract lightning, was a bad idea and wouldn’t it be too bright. Also, I had the windows, but putting them in would cost a lot more. Which we hadn’t got. But got eventually.
Which is why, on a bright crisp frosty morning, such as you read about in Victorian novels, I can see Croagh Patrick, the Holy Mountain, as well as a few others in Mayo. The light changes constantly, and the snow reveals, often for the first time in years, the iced crown of a distant hill. I never tire of these views.
At night, which falls early, I walk from window to window to look at the rectangles of stars glittering above the lights of houses, obscured briefly by the arc of car lights slicing the sky from the Clonnabinnia road, but not diminished by the faint yellow glow from Galway to the East, or maybe the West. I grew up on a peninsula where things move around depending on where you are.
I’m always amazed when I check North on the little compass my husband gave me as a gift. ‘To find your way around.’
I haven’t the foggiest idea why, but I like walking from window to window and watching the needle, or the body of the thing, swing around wildly before coming to rest at an unlikely point.
Otherwise, it’s like satnav, you can’t really trust that it’ll get you anywhere you want to go.
The view changes by the hour. Mutable landscape, fickle as light.
One day the hills gleam, capped with the undependable luminosity of sleet.
Next day it changes. Rain lashes the house, the cats hide in the hot press or under beds because they don’t want to go out, not even for five minutes and I am online looking for cheap flights. South, and I don’t need a compass to tell me which way that is.
Yet again, I have made it to January, the twelfth day. Twelfth Night in England. Here, it is Nollaig na mBan, the Women’s Christmas, also known as Little Christmas, the feast of the epiphany. I love it, not alone for the memories of my grandmother, who celebrated it and first told me its name, but for the fact that it is only after this date that the first tiny increments of the lengthening days become obvious in the evening sky, measured in the past in ‘leath coisceim coiligh’, or half a cock’s step. Not much at first, but enough.
I have always been drawn to the night sky, and this is the perfect place to see it from. On starry nights, the planes stitch towards America, and two pass above the house heading towards Shannon from New York and Boston. A satellite flashes over the lake. The three sisters are where they ought to be and Venus shines brightest of all, even with a sky so full of hard cold light.
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Mary's eighth collection of poems, Playing the Octopus, was published by Carcanet Press in August 2016 and can be found here.
