Dublin Opinion

It’s my birthday today, and no, I’m not going to tell you how old I am. But let us say that you’re never too old to get presents. I have yet to receive any but I’m sure when I get home they’ll be presented with a flourish and I will, no doubt, make an emotional fuss while opening them. While I know that my present givers are imaginative enough its fair to guess that this year, once again, I won’t get that Bathysphere I’ve always hankers after.

Maybe next year, eh?

Poem: ‘The Bathysphere’ By Don Paterson

What would you want with that? They said, and fairly,
when the auctioneer’s van dumped it in the drive.
It was far worse than they knew. One absent bidder
had ruined me for the thing, the quartz was cracked

and I’d lied about it being a prototype;
none survived, thanks to the famous flaw
that left them on the seabed with their pilots
smeared all over their one wall. No matter.

This thing still looked straight out of the codex
with its double skin of pig iron and sheet steel,
the daft bespoke of all that brass-and-walnut
and, of course, that eye. Which I avoided.

From the air I must have looked like a dung-beetle
as I wrestled it, all breathers and reverses,
over the hill and into the ring of rocks
I’d laid the day before as anchorage.

What did I want with it? God only knows
there were days when I wondered, sat bored to tears
with my legs asleep, my hands on the dead levers
and barely light to read the empty log,

but something – it was maybe just the cost –
had me stay on, and so I kept my station
till such goose-cries or gear-grinds as could reach me
came slowed and lowered as through a dream of water.

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This post was inspired by the Patterson poem above which was published in a recent issue of the London Review of Books. The whole poem is available on the LRB site, only if you have subscription though.

 

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MP3 of the Smog song Bathysphere courtesy of Letters Have No Arms.