In Memory by Thomas Kinsella
PN Review 91, September - October 1993
In Memory
You were silver-quiffed and tall
and smiling above us in public,
formal and at ease. Established.
Introducing I have forgotten what.
It is you I remember.
Authoritative, from the Department.
Published recently and discussed.
Managing both careers.
The audience, mainly literary
stood about, interested
in what was to come. But we
were gathered at your feet.
II
The years passed. Our group broke up.
The character of our generation
emerged, with the fulfilment
and the failure of early promise,
with achievement in surprising places,
and one startling success
revealing a sagacity and a scope
undreamed of at the time.
Some left the country, or disappeared
as though they had never been.
Others stayed in irregular contact,
our conversations growing more general.
III
A few assembled lately
on a miserable occasion.
We found each other in a crowd
from the intervening years,
familiar and unfamiliar faces,
acquaintance and strangers,
friends from later interests.
An unpleasantness here and there
– one, quiet-spoken and confiding,
not to be trusted again;
one nursing an old dispute
and able behind the scenes.
The narrow face of envy.
Hardness of heart. Self.
False witness. The irreducible
malice and greed of the species.
*
We stood near the older trees
– your box, massive and pale,
waiting on a pile of clay.
With what you were taking with you.
And leaving. The memory
of a gentle self, offended
by the unmanageable,
a roused and self-devouring.
I walked away along a file
of long-established graves,
remembering our last meeting.
You, overcoated and withdrawn,
and sitting beside the fire
after another death.
Violent. One of yours,
inheriting your luck.
And I, making my way across
and settling at your side;
you starting a conversation
out of another time.
When I turned around to go back
it was a while before I discovered
our people among the others
– everybody everywhere with white hair.
Thomas Kinsella (1928-2021) was born in Dublin in 1928. He was educated at University College, Dublin and entered the Irish Civil Service before becoming a full-time writer and teach in the USA. He was the author of over thirty books of poetry and of essays, and editor of The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse. He passed away in December 2021. Last Poems - a collection that brings together his final Peppercanister pamphlets, along with a selection of new poems, fragments and revised work - was published in 2023.
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