Naomi Foyle New Poem | The Recusant

Naomi Foyle

Grey Sunshine

after b/w by Niall McDevitt (22.02.1967 – 29.09.2022)

October and I stop

on the verge of this world

acknowledge two small beacons

of eldritch electricity —

a pair of poet ghosts

lit by fungal filaments

drizzling onyx sigils

in the incandescent grass

you were born in Limerick I the same night in Islington

we met on our 39th birthday in a clapped-out white BMW —

I in the back with my Belsize Park beau Diana driving

up to a cold curb where you quaffed and quiffed

guitar case buttressing a lamp post Blake’s prints under your arm

squeezed in beside me and we were off

a night-scented bouquet of bohos and bon mots floating

through London to someone’s drunken boat on the Thames

where at a party being thrown for neither of us

we learned we both wrote poetry both

had backpacked round Europe with a tattered Rimbaud

when you strapped on your guitar sang Blake’s Songs

I fell silent

. . . don’t remember which ones . . .

no one had a phone

no one ever recorded those Songs

no one can delete

my first memory of your face ‒

haloed in the sulfur of Soho

and a faint cloud

of your February

breath

oh those Facebook photos of your last weeks

bedding down now in my mind —

your stoic flair a salt and dandelion poultice

I press against the axe wound

to my root

You nearly always had a girlfriend; I, a boyf ‒

except for that night you stayed at mine in Brighton after a gig.

I rolled out the futon, fetched the spare duvet, plumped your pillow

and, when you admired my undoubtedly-not-amber cat, told you the story

of my abortive trip from Cairo to the Temple of Bastet ‒ defeated

by a carriage full of smokers, only to be accosted by a man on the platform:

WHAT IS WRONG WITH EGYPTIAN TRAINS??

I towered over you, fists on hips.

You laughed. I went to bed.

Our spell unbroken.

That photo of us at the launch of b/w ‒

skulls touching, faces blissful

time twins joined at the head

Your death

singed the days

blanched the nights

snapped the spine

of twinship

drained my mirror

of movement

turned my trust

in cosmic order

into a negative

of faith

you

shocked silver hair

blackened grin

bleached soot-stripe suit

receding

as I

white-lipped

grey-skinned

black-eyed

flow on

an asymmetric 55 —

where once you walked

unseen, opposite,

in step

now a whistling wind

cold shoulders

my vision of the universe

into reverse

the past more alive

than the present

the future a tightening

trap

I write eco-science fiction.

But did not foresee your death.

I don’t recall snakes ever licking

my ears. And if they licked yours,

you never said.

We both studied Thoth.

Though when I gave you a Tarot reading

I unaccountably trembled

and the cards made no sense.

to keep my balance

I grasp

at black and white omens

serendipities

mystic correspondences . . .

Hey, little sister in the pub before the funeral

a polka dot scarf draped over the Metro box

at Victoria Station

a Tyger Angel Wing hoodie

on the train to work

I do realise that sightings

of black and white trainers

bearing our shared initial

are purely coincidental ‒

but still they burn

lightning bolts

in my eyes

To die at 55, in your prime.

To spend a tenth of your life dying.

To be tithed to death.

To not tell your friends you were ill

because you wanted us to flower,

create our art, unblighted by grief.

You had the courage for tragedy.

Trusted we would as well.

Time, that sleepless magpie,

thieved so much from you ‒

but I will not let it snatch

the silver apples of your songs

the golden apple of your laugh

You came to a small, white bread, Tory city,

in long black coat, blue eyes sips of sky, stood

on a Cathedral lawn beneath a twice-toppled steeple ‒

and as an army of twitchers trained telephoto lenses

on invisible peregrines, you played your bodhran

to curious students, oblivious shoppers, coiffed chihuahuas,

obscene SUVs, tired Stagecoach buses, Sophia’s falcon ‒

and there you are still, opposite Waterstones and Wetherspoons,

a Pidgin English Irishman drumming up Britain’s Babel

of sinklands and tower blocks, prophetae and plague pits ‒

Soho sirens, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, Sekhmet, the jinn,

Roundheads, Romans and Rastas, coopers, traders and hoodies,

Chagall’s psalm, Grenfell’s ashes, Blake’s Angels,

unreeling around you on the ecchoing green

The reason you have breast cancer

my oncologist told me

is because you have breasts.

Oh Niall, we’ve all fallen

asleep in the sun.

Please let us let

that one hot day

float free

blithe as a larkling

The reason you had skin cancer

is because you had skin

the white lambskin of your Northern kin

the thin parchment skin of a poet

the thrumming skin of a bodhran

and though that ‘black sun’ on your belly

proved a terrible beauty spot

the kind of ravaging beauty

it kills us to know

in your illness

in your humour

in London’s charms

and Julie’s arms

in poem after poem

impelled by the past

haunted by the future

struck by the moment

you became one

with the drum of the world

and our days are as grass

we flower among the toadstools —

those inky wigs, refulgent ruffled eggs

charged by a power beyond us

to divulge Earth’s grievous laws

if not in a grey dawn

where would black embrace white?

if the world was not hollow

how would love sound?

NOTE. Poet, musician and London ‘poetopographer’ Niall McDevitt lived with cancer for six years. A gelatinous spot on his abdomen, initially diagnosed as a 'jelly mould', proved to be malignant; although its colour was atypical of skin cancer, Niall, in an unpublished poem, referred to his melanoma as a 'black sun'. The phrase ‘the incandescent grass’ is from the poem ‘Liberty Caps’ in Niall’s debut collection b/w (Waterloo Press, 2010).