I REMEMBER poetry, sex and death. These were the three muses of my teenage years in the 1970s in Leitrim an era of carnivals, drunken festivals, gropings in the back of Cortinas, publishing my first poetry (and spotting a Yeats poem plagiarised in the local paper) and encountering death in many forms, each time trailing the same indifferent mask.
The incident of the Yeats poem still amuses me. It was 1974 or 1975 and I'd been given W.B.'s selected poems as a birthday present. On page 36 or so I came across a truly awful poem called Sweet heart do not love too long.
O sweetheart do not love too long
For I loved long and long
And grew to be out of fashion
Like an old song.
This poem gave me great hope and encouragement and obviously inspired at least one other person in the county to put pen to paper a few weeks later the same poem appeared in the poetry section of the Leitrim Observer, only this time the author was M.J. or P.J. Somebody from a town in the North. Great was my youthful shock and indignation though I wasn't the least bit surprised that the editors hadn't immediately marked the poem as the undisputed work of a Nobel prizewinner.
It was around this time in summer that I published my own first poems in the same paper, one of them addressing a later theme of the anti-heroes of the IRA.
My brother warned me (half joking, whole serious) that I might be tarred and feathered by some of the local enough lads, and I had a brief vision of myself stumbling along a lane near Drumshanbo where a girl had indeed been left in terror some weeks earlier. For a while I watched the shadows and the headlights as I walked home from dances, but I was left alone.
The thrill of seeing my first poems in print smudges in my memory with the smell of woodbine, the long light of warm evenings, the high, awkward, elegant step of a donkey through a summer gap. It saddens me not a little now that hay ricks and turf ricks and donkeys have almost vanished from the landscape to be replaced by ugly, surreal clusters of black plastic wrapped bales and ever changing machinery that drives the heart out of nature.
I was at least as obsessed with sex as I was with poetry and summer seemed to bring on lust with an even greater intensity. Early teenage trysts in haylofts gave way to more mature though less comfortable encounters in cars and one memorable dizzy, erotic journey through the country night on the back of an open pick up truck.
I fell in love and lust with great regularity and fed these hard ons with fantasies from the occasional porn magazine that did the rounds. John McGahern's The Dark was another source of sexual consolation and inspiration young Mahoney's summer story tinted my own with an edge of the familiar given sweet, and bitter articulation.
WITH a summer literary diet of McGahern, Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas and Playboy I suppose it was inevitable that death would become a seasonal companion. Sunlight and death are inextricably linked in my memory and imagination partly because I saw my first corpse in a bright July room, partly because my grandmother and later my mother died in that same month, and not least because my beloved collie dog of youth was killed on a summer evening in the fixed chase of a rabbit across fields and a sudden fatal road.
Sometimes now that familiar place, those times seem immeasurably distant and remote. Most of my former objects of desire are in the US, Australia or even further away within a universe of miles. Many meadows are gone to seed or vanished to the forestry and I can't imagine how anyone could find a moment of eroticism among hay bales and the smell of silage.
Still, memory has its day I set out to write about the EU and its effects on traditional agriculture, its rapid alteration of the face of summer in rural Ireland, and instead found myself recalling snippets of poetry, sex and death. Three things that even the EU can't take away from us, that can't be turned into mountains or lakes or quotas, that can't be reduced to a source of grants or enticements off the land.
Three constants, three muses still they bring my summers with them.
