A Garage in Co. Cork

Surely you paused at this roadside oasis

In your nomadic youth, and saw the mound

Of never-used cement, the curious faces,

The soft-drink ads and the uneven ground

Rainbowed with oily puddles, where a snail

Had scrawled its slimy, phosphorescent trail.

Like a frontier store-front in an old western

It might have nothing behind it but thin air,

Building materials, fruit boxes, scrap iron,

Dust-laden shrubs and coils of rusty wire,

A cabbage-white fluttering in the sodden

Silence of an untended kitchen garden —

Nirvana! But the cracked panes reveal a dark

Interior echoing with the cries of children.

Here in this quiet corner of Co. Cork

A family ate, slept, and watched the rain

Dance clean and cobalt the exhausted grit

So that the mind shrank from the glare of it.

Where did they go? South Boston? Cricklewood?

Somebody somewhere thinks of this as home,

Remembering the old pumps where they stood,

Antique now, squirting juice into a cream

Lagonda or a dung-caked tractor while

A cloud swam on a cloud-reflecting tile.

Surely a whitewashed sun-trap at the back

Gave way to hens, wild thyme, and the first few

Shadowy yards of an overgrown cart track,

Tyres in the branches such as Noah knew —

Beyond, a swoop of mountain where you heard,

Disconsolate in the haze, a single blackbird.

Left to itself, the functional will cast

A death-bed glow of picturesque abandon.

The intact antiquities of the recent past,

Dropped from the retail catalogues, return

To the materials that gave rise to them

And shine with a late sacramental gleam.

A god who spent the night here once rewarded

Natural courtesy with eternal life —

Changing to petrol pumps, that they be spared

For ever there, an old man and his wife.

The virgin who escaped his dark design

Sanctions the townland from her prickly shrine.

We might be anywhere but are in one place only,

One of the milestones of earth-residence

Unique in each particular, the thinly

Peopled hinterland serenely tense —

Not in the hope of a resplendent future

But with a sure sense of its intrinsic nature.

Copyright Credit: Derek Mahon, "A Garage in Co. Cork" from New Collected Poems. Copyright © 2011 by Derek Mahon. Reprinted by permission of The Gallery Press.

Source: Collected Poems (The Gallery Press, 2008)