Читать книгу Reconstructions - Steafán Hanvey - Страница 14

Late Developer

My first lessons in light

were under the cover

of darkness.

From bardic lamp-lit

country roads

to safelight enclosed,

the darkroom in Irish Street

was like a look-out post,

the milk crate –

a bosun-chair,

allowing me,

surgeon’s mate,

a child’s-eye view

of jackdaws

squatting murderously

on derelict chimneypots,

and of-a-world,

none too fair

or familiar.

Like a surgeon-cum-midwife

with suspect-devices,

you took your work

under the knife

in here,

attempting sutures

of out there.

Eager to please,

I’d scan our theatre

through your fag-fug

and mouth a silent

Check! for each tool laid down,

each procedure enacted:

Stop-bath, tongs, developer,

fixer, enlarger, timer,

thermometer, trays, squeegee – Check!

With your inverted-subverted images,

you conjured the lifeless,

summoning visions,

bent on renewal.

As the news was breaking

out there,

the water broke in here,

like amniotic fluid

gushing around the sink,

making it difficult

to think.

Like a tilt-shifted

Niagara Falls,

it swished, sputtered,

ebbed and flowed.

You’d let me tip away

at the developing-tray

as we’d impatiently watch

the edges burn grey,

one sorrowful flowering

after another,

secrets wrung from

tragedy, unwriting white,

developing and fixing the night.

Surfacing through

the fog-salt,

negatively positive

stills are born,

light-insensitive,

so peaceful and mute,

rendered, not sundered,

after the storm.

As you pull on your fag

the end flits freely,

firefly-like.

My da:

a memory-making middleman,

assessor from The Ministry of Lost Causes,

taking sides under cover of darkness,

an aftermathematician,

reducing a formula,

a variable bidder

with oblivion,

a framer and custodian

of unsolicited closures.

You print contact-sheets

that electrify the eye;

You deliver stills that are

memorial-machines

which incubate

as the world outside

contemplates.

When I spy with my child’s eye,

I’m conspiring in

your world of creation.

You’re there with the look of

a hunted light-gatherer.

Your camera obscura

captures history in utero

and performs a routine-delivery.

Yours is a mid-wife’s elation,

quiet and jaded,

clutching the slippery spoils of a war

that is long-past born

but labouring still.

Your magical contraption:

full to the brim

with the defaced lore

of places and faces,

times and crimes,

an antiquary of intrigue,

housing a poor man’s chiaroscuro.

A moment stretched

for partners-in-time,

we’re the aproned saints

of impossible causes –

late developers.