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  • Filíocht Nua:New Poetry
  • Mary Montague

To the Registrar of the General Medical Council, London

I write in response to your recent letterto my father. It is with (strangely burning)regret that I must inform you that hehas been diagnosed (this time last year)as suffering from dementia.

He's been demented for longer:chess moves in the patterns of tiles;bridge ploys his constant conversationwith me who never learned to play.He stares from the cave of his duvetwith a hunted look; talks of winterrations, troop movements—batteningto hoard survival's crumbs.

I presume this circumstancemeans that his registrationis no longer tenable.

He watches me:the same furtive surveillancewith which I eyed himas a child—disinterest as decoy;but keeps the clear blue chillof his gaze true to the faultlines, the shifts that could meanthe sea ice opening. [End Page 33]

NeverthelessI would like to inquireif it is possible for himto retain his title.

It is the thing he is proudest of:achieved aged twenty-three.Sixty years is a long downhill.All the same, I can see it was a beaconclawed towards from the slumsof Brooklyn, the bogs of Tyrone,as the lit fuse of his intelligencehissed through cellarsof poverty, disappointment.

His intelligence. Now it sputters,crackles in odd corners, sparkingthrough a mess of confusion, rageand fear. It's still spoken ofwith something like reverence in this parish,his old practice, where he arrivedas a fresh scion of the newly-mintedNational Health Service and was greetedby a mixture of suspicion and awe:a Catholic doctor? Whoever heardof such a thing? He was twenty-eight, most eligible,but despite his periods in Dublin,Whitehaven,Kent, was raw and pious as a cleric.He tended that practice like a shepherd,losing himself in service, inspiredby a simmer of fractured confidenceand clouded empathy to a dedicationapproaching love. The startling acquisition,in his forties, of wife, children, brought no ease;only more anxiety, which he shouldered,sidelined, in the nameof his all-encompassing duty. [End Page 34]

When I was young, his standing in the communitywas a scald to me who knew himdifferently. Now it is some slight comfortwhen yet another in a long lineof ex-patients tells me, voicegrave with appreciation,that he was a great doctor.

Over twenty years after leaving homeI have some glimmerof the forces, the imperatives,that drove him.

They are not a stone's throw from my own.

So. While the doctor may be dementedhe is still the doctor—in the fifties, only a breathfrom the priest and from God.

My father was a committed public servantwho managed a single-handed practicefor almost forty years. Being a doctorwas everything to him. I trust that (at least for now)he can remain, technically, a memberof the medical profession. With thanksSincerelyhis daughter. [End Page 35]

Swallows

They hurl themselves above an acre of lawnoverlooking a tree-fringed lake. A paradiseof insects inspires them. They've lobbedtheir fragile bodies over African swamp,savannah, Saharan vastness, funnelledinto Europe through the Strait of Gibraltarand flung themselves across to Ireland for thisaerial plankton. They're quick and agileas their tiny prey: same darts, directionchanges, that give fly-swatting its tension.They make it a gambol, their frenziedmetabolism fuelled by the flesh of thousands.They dip, dive, swoop, loop, swarmtogether, reel away, flatten out overthe blades, float up, circle and climb, thenpeel off with a flash of sailor-white belly.Every twist is a gauze of flickering wing;each smooth-shouldered downstroke a surgeof orbital power, almost gravity-freein a dart-like form that skims into longshallow undulations. In sun, they iridescewith indigo; in shade, they're swart as plum.Blurred with speed, the fused pellet of headand torso bisects a sickle of wing; onlytime slows them enough to catch the tail'slovely fork, the studs of...

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