Karl O'Hanlon: from Herron's Dream Diary

LA PAIX (1931–1939)


Herron kept a dream diary in a gilt-edged blue notebook.
Touching it, a spark frisked his blood cells. Sleep
devoured waking in its pages, wildcat static crept
along the spine, a trout’s rainbow unravelling on a hook.








The cobbles on the rue Rollin wince like goosebumps
in a snivel of rain. In the bleary autumn sun, shop signs
equivocate: TENTURES, or TORTURES? The sun’s
flare dissipates, shrugs itself into a few misty humps

and hollows. At 6 rue Rollin, Herron lodged with Ben
Fondane—tall, crow-chested, in forest green beret, green
scarf, their street of booksellers and hard-up maîtres-de-ballet
couched in the pit of a foggy never-ending Sunday.

In the beginning was Exodus, or, how to become a hooligan.
Go back before that to Ben’s childhood, the blue grasses
of Moldavia, little white town where cow bladders
blanched the fields, town of Jews hanging in the air. Again

begin with a still hand, lover’s, draughtsman’s, paraded by ants.
Start over, tear the diary page: commit to the overpowering
smell of salt-herring and cow-dung; quickly, lightly glance
at the blazing wood, the ceremonies of blood and iron.

Retrace the abandoned lecture halls where, once, malaise
stretched like an old cat amidst talcum and starched collars,
numerus nullus, the curl of tortured flies, odd hollers
of desire: ‘I’d like to feel an enemy in myself to be erased’.

Among the ruins of Sarmizegetusa, King Decebal’s ashes
stir and flake onto the laconic tongues of men bred
for days of violence, who pray to die as Decebal died,
believing whoso dies rises in flaking tongues among the ashes.

Recur nightmares with adolescent voices, baptisms of death.
In the suburb of Auteuil where stiff Catholic widows
wear Scottish tweed and walk Pekinese, relive the snows
of your childhood, windows festive with opal-frosted breath.

Bucharest-on-the-Seine’s posters and playbills are cut up,
rearranged in abrupt semblances; Brâncuși’s
Leda masters vortices of brute air, shut up
in the cool white rushes, the swansong of herself.

Riot lights the Maldoror café; in the fracas, surrealist pope Breton
brandishes a Freudian Baedeker. Emil Cioran beckons
his obsessions, tongues a loose tooth, cultivating nirvana
by violence. The word’s out: even infants mouth ‘Dada’.

Herron attended draughty seminars at a diplomatic academy
under the rigid shapes and straight lines of the Port-Royal.
The manual was Irish-Jansenist: We do not wish to engage in any controversy.
Exceptions included joining in a rowdy saccharine Horst-Wessel-

Lied in the Gresham Hotel at Herr Hempel’s annual Weihnachtsfeier,
the spiced cakes and wax evergreen that brought a thousand-year
tear to Frau Mahr’s eyes. But look, all that was way before
Aisling took Herron’s hand to light the portable menorah

in her attic window, dwarfed by candled gorse on Arthur’s Seat.
Her tongue on his was slow, fricative: a seal on an ice floe.
She smelled of mown-hay, which Herron later realised
was synthetic coumarin; hepatoxic, damaging to the liver.

Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow,
Herron committed to the air,
her presence all but air,
Yet follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow.

One winter, Ben filled a lukewarm bath, dropped sheaves
of his unfinished poems in it. In the dampness
of the apartment, the steam made them rise like loaves
and take on the appearance of brilliant swans.

Dalí in a diving suit, lecturing in flamboyant Catalan,
grasping two borzois and a billiard cue; a bloom
of fog orchid on the glass sent someone to fetch a spanner,
loosen the bolts and let the orchids into the room.

Someone, Herron said to himself, is practicing Brahms.
Lamps light the rue de Verneuil. The piano’s revelation:
the difference between mine and me, the Seine
incandescent, fiery with woven theme and variation.

Óró mo bháidín, Ag snámh ar a’gcuan, Óró mo bháidín,
Herron sang outside the Bar du Départ. Molloy
at his left, unfussily elegant in trench and surgeon
eyeglasses, hesitant like a shy horse, his cowboy

face all angles above a dingy gingham tablecloth;
Coeuvre to his right, with soup-stained cuffs, priest
and celebrant to the mysteries of Aquinas and truth
residing in the intellect. Jean du Chas, chef des Concentristes

(sad cunts, said Molloy) concentrated a wonky eyeball
sur les trottoirs for an off-shift concierge. ‘Why do you invite
that loser from Toulouse?’ Coeuvre spat. In a piebald
mohair suit, Ben sat a little aloof from the gang. ‘Va t’embêter

d’ailleurs, go get bored in someone else’s dreams,’ the Toulousien
said to him. Coeuvre tucked to franc-sized lobster pies
he called ‘Pithiviers’. Don’t mention that, sighed Ben,
dreaming of the abandoned station, sputtering cattle lorries,

an indigo petrol spill, the sugar refinery. Herron, decoding,
chose non-intervention. Puffily handsome, raddled
from Gamza wine, he turned inward and bladdered
out the last line of the song: Óró mo churaichín ó, Óró mo bháidín.

Herron woke to the marine alcoves of the Room of Waters.
Ben had carried him there to dry out and rest.
A basset-faced monk administered a purgative of myrrh
and crushed narwhal horn. The room was fresh

with galbanum and mint; a German officer with a face towel
spritzed in tuberose and storax lay nude and comatose
next to him. The monk administered Portuguese
sweet orange oil and neroli, chanting, Powerless over alcohol,

we turned our lives over. They rubbed Alchermes into Herron’s
neck. From Arabic, qirmiz, meaning crimson, it was a confection
of oak-eating red insects, ambergris, silk, and cinnamon,
which if drunk, rather than anointed, caused inebriation.

And he caught a whiff of Fleur de Bulgarie, Bulgarian rose
lashed with musk, which his straight-backed, six-foot
great-aunt had delicately applied to her stern, silvery throat.
And was that Peau d’Espagne, a cedarwood-dowsed

creak of kidskin? And what were the monks brewing
in the lab behind the curtain? Was anonymity
the spiritual foundation of their traditions, stewing
almondy Prussic acid into volatilities of sweet simplicity?

Herron dreams of a table with stale brown
bread, three crescents of sliced orange,
a walnut-half like a kitten’s brain.
February light pools in strange

mannerist scallops on his desk and dream
diary. He carefully sweeps his eyebrows
into his pocket, nothing furtive or louche
in the movement, goes about his dream.

And as for dreaming, our rhymes will do that for us: that leveret
-trimmed nightie spritzed with vetiver Aisling wore en levrette
the night Pétain made belief in Joan of Arc’s angelic voices
law. Half-covered in molleton sheets, the room live and moist

as a butterfly house, Herron sat for a portrait by Aisling.
Gauleiters and horseboys of the Frățiia de Cruce
sauntered out to hear Django play La Chope des Puces,
his guitar stride nudged by clouds from his Gitane.

Aisling held Herron’s wine to the faucet, to thin it down.
Sat at her canvas, she resumed painting him nude—
long bony limbs, Christ loincloth of swan-down
and cambric blanket, the lizard dewlap of his throat.

A body risible, loveable, not undesirable. The oleander
in a vase by the bed proved difficult, not for tone per se,
but the glycosides thrumming inside, salamander
or cyanide ineffective poisons next to that white bouquet.

The problem of its toxic belly fascinated Aisling, what
way she might insinuate it with some sleight of brush.
I’m blurring things together and it’s not like that,
she thought, thought betraying her lines into a slush.

They had late supper at a brasserie behind the Opéra.
The summer evening light rocked sluggishly,
as did the adenoidal brine in their oyster platter.
Sharp waiters purposively ignored gestures. Priggishly,

Herron swatted his Armagnac glass off the edge of the table,
not before tilting it to the ceiling, draining
it. A waiter mumbled: ‘’Sieur, we are unable
to serve you’. A bomber flew over an ÉIRE sign. Raining,

probably, in Dublin, on the Victorian yawn of O’Connell
Street, dusty shopfronts, a runny charcoal of newsboys
on bikes, and a gosling train of nuns like lilies,
the hawkers’ cries contending with Whitefriars’ bell.

Herron crammed for the examination: Grotius and natural
law, the alien acts, the precise weight of a dead royal mistress’s rustling
petticoat. He took breaks in the Ursuline gardens. Snuffling
shadows of apple trees embroidered the red bricks in brocatelle.

History, cack-limbed yet cunning, whistled past the scene of disaster
refusing to change, the disastrous crash of reeking coins,
moving through the placid young novices with birdsong
clawing in their mild throats, hosannas for their pierced master.

Blood ran from eardrums. Trumpets blazed the orchestra pit.
Coriolanus in blackshirts makes grown men sweat like lice.
The age accelerated in spasm for what would suffice,
ageing seaside towns seething for more destructive shit.

Herron thought: what else could one do, but be charming
(though pinprick sensitive in defence of charm), cultivating
a passion for ignorance made from the most austere
materials, attitudes cribbed from worm-meal courtiers

whose brocade and filagree even now, in mildew or mould,
shines on hearts that beat violently and will not die.
Like Tutankhamen among bric-à-brac, smeared gold
alibis, dark arts, the photo of a best-loved child, they lie

in expensive unobtrusive coffins made for mandarins,
connoisseurs of their own spectacular putrefaction.
Best be on guard and glib, Herron thought. We’re dead meat,
toothless worms taking it all in, all in the best possible taste.

Ben took Herron to the Folies. ‘They’re clowns,’ he said. ‘Like us poets’.
A comedian balanced a miniature kepi on his pubic bone,
hoisted his balls either side as cheeks, his penis as the nose
of General de Gaulle. He waggled his turkey tail. The crowd groaned.

They were a discerning bunch: thought mime a tragic waste of money
and time, liked the stuff where you couldn’t breathe for slurs,
shed tears for the Lit Banger up the Bottom closing ceremony.
Most of all, they loved a self-maiming stunt; lapped it up, the hoors.

Herron remembered Latin lessons; around the bend of Horace’s
hexameters, in dove-mauve cornfields or lemon groves,
a family man, upright, moderate in learning and wealth,
was fashioning a whip out of sunlight to beat a slave to death.






Karl O'Hanlon teaches in the English Department at Maynooth University. He has published poems in Poetry (Chicago), The Times Literary Supplement, The Irish Times, PN Review, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere. His pamphlet And Now They Range was published by Guillemot Press in 2016.