I wrote this piece while staying at Cliveden House, in the south of England by the river Thames, a place infamous for illicit sexual liaisons in the time of Charles the Second and his close friend, the Duke of Buckingham. The tradition carried on into the nineteen-sixties with the Profumo affair and the first meeting there of that government minister and Christine Keeler. And it was all of a piece with the conversation I was not supposed to hear between an anxious, furtive couple while shielded in my high backed chair supposedly concentrating on my book.
It set me to thinking about all the parallel illicit liaisons we carry on: those secret relationships that we keep hidden from the light of day; most especially our rocky relationship with death - our own unspoken lover - who always secretly accompanies us.
MORTALITY MY MISTRESS carries the knife edge understanding of our own fleeting visitation and disappearance. Life as the lover, husband, wife, who appears and then goes no matter the depths of that love nor the years we spend together, and then our own selves as that lover: the intimate knowledge of our own mortality, our own eventual going, almost like a secret inner compass line, a hidden relationship with our own going, driving much of the beautiful sanities and insanities of our attempts to love and be loved in the mortal world.
MORTALITY MY MISTRESS Silence, the quiet of centuries in the ancient room and the sense of others here before us as if everyone now is waking to the same morning all the others discovered, looking out as they did to the geese flying north or south, the Thames below feeling its way to a distant sea. And their mortality is like my mortality, a hidden lover with whom we have woken, someone we refuse to acknowledge to those outside, looking in, a secret we keep from the waking day. But today I know I will announce her and walk with her and show affection in the public room and this declaration will be a testament to the hidden but suspected in others, an example and a surety to the unspoken and above all a proclamation to the unfaithful who carefully bide their endless time. My declaration will be absolute. An arrival in the here and the now. Then there will be little else to do. I will have become like the madman running to see the moon in the window, the hawk I saw tracing the cliff edge above the river. I will be the man I have pursued all along and finally caught. I will be all my intuitions and all my desires and then I will walk slowly down the steps as if dressed in white and wade into the water for a second baptism. I will be like someone who cannot hide their love but my joy will become ordinary and everyday and like a lover I will find out exactly what it is like to be the happiest, the only one in creation to really understand how much, I'm just a hair's breadth from dying. from River Flow: New & Selected Poems: Revised Edition
I just love the photo David. So much texture and presence and romance in that almost black and white shot. How could you resist that sky! As for the poem, like so many of your works, it bears witness to your being such an ordinary human being (that is not meant as an insult!) but with extra-ordinary gifts of openness, honesty, awareness of your own and therefore the human condition, and a willingness to declare your truth, no matter how personal. You have married your masculine and feminine aspects and are not afraid of your own heart or intuitions and not afraid of death. And your fluency in the Irish / English language is simply beautiful. To be understood by any reader, but built on ancient traditions, coloured by PNW and Zen influences, which personally I love. I am enjoying your Substack postings. Dawn from Tobago West Indies.
The deeper my relational ship with death the more I create a wonderful life. Poetry yours and mine has helped me access the more truthful alive parts within me. I’ve come to appreciate this fleeting moment in time we have earthside. Blessed we are. 💐