Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

this city of pageants and festivals

its patience gone and its voice hoarse

politically at its wits’ end

raided its wardrobe and fancy-dress box to gather up its masks and face-paint so that it might deck itself out in its most ghastly colours and come staggering through the cobbled streets as

a company of zombies, moving with more purpose than you would imagine while trailing their winding cloths through the narrow lanes of the Latin quarter where they met up with a stilted Bo Peep — ten feet tall and with six days’ growth of beard under a platinum fright wig — shepherding a small flock of sheep away from flying spiders that menaced them from overhead, their pitiful bleating causing them to herd in a circle, bumping and tripping over each other just as a company of golden samba queens spilled out of a nearby pub and two by two, to the tune of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ they herded the sheep up the main pedestrian street, all plumed and gilded and gathering to their beat buskers and jugglers and a couple of fire-eaters who were naked to the waist and smelling of kerosene, all falling into step beside the zombies who had made common cause with the spiders, taking the lash of Bo Peep’s scourge along the pedestrian area with their own reflections in the large shop windows moving step by step with them to draw a family of clowns from a side street, mammy and daddy and two kids with wide red grins which threatened to engulf their heads and Elvis and Charlie Chaplin, both with their hands in their pockets and deep in conversation, both fell into step with no apparent heed of where they were headed, drawn on by some horizontal gravity which pulled from another side street the full complement of the medieval music society in full raiment, friars and pardoners, merchants and mendicants, maidens and widows fronted by a knight in knitted chain-mail and a wooden sword, all with their lutes and recorders and tambourines, doing what they could to rejig a madrigal to the samba beat, the procession moving on till it came to the top of the street where the park opened up beneath the banners of the city’s founding fathers which now flew over this congregation which appeared to have been drawn from some realm where the living and the dead stood shoulder to shoulder sharing a joke and a fag as a hen party of mermaids appeared with devil’s horns and an L-plate stitched to the girl’s chest who passed around a naggin of vodka and insisted on sharing it with a family of Fir Bolgs, swaying bulbous giants whose useless arms and height made the job impossible and threatened to spoil the girl’s fun for a moment before she disappeared into the maw of a multi-coloured dragon who appeared from around the corner of the public toilets, lowering his mouth over her to pick her up bodily amid much squawking laughter, her tanned legs kicking from the dragon’s mouth who now turned and made off with her into the centre of the park where the figure of a fifty-foot Lemuel Gulliver was the natural focal point for all those other characters now streaming out of the night, two children in corpse-paint holding Morticia’s hand, the child with a square head and a bolt through his neck, paler children with capes and fangs — some cowled, with their own scythes and hourglasses — plus all the little girls in Irish dancing costumes who had their hair done up in fluorescent curlers on top of their heads like small Medusas beside those kids in cowboy suits and Indian feathers — kids out way past their bedtime on a school night but happy to recognise old friends — Snow White and her seven butties, Dopey and Sneezy and the whole gang, all tooled up with picks and shovels and marching to the beat

hey ho, hey ho

it’s off to work we go

whistling their little tune and drawn on by the rhythm of the samba beat they shouldered their picks and headed off across the grass towards the corner of the square where they fell in behind a small flatbed truck which was mounted by a trio of charred demons playing lead and rhythm guitars and drums, churning out a bass rhythm which hits the centre of the chest as it drew on the cortege with Gulliver leading the rest of the assembled night creatures as they funnelled into the narrow street with their whistles and tambourines, making space to skip and dance, ghouls and trolls and zombies picking up a kind of jigging two-step which took them past the Magdalene monument and across the intersection where traffic had to come to a halt, up the hill by the bus station and student hostel by which time everyone had taken up their proper place in the procession, the demon car leading the way with its bludgeoning rhythms and Snow White’s dwarves setting the military tone of the procession, marching along beneath the towering figure who was kept upright by so many outriders with ropes and stays, then manoeuvred carefully into the car park and up the path towards the city offices as if he were about to knock on its tiny door and request admittance at this late hour though, as he approached, the whole facade

disappeared on cue behind a massive white sheet which cascaded from the roof of the building, falling under its own weight from the top of the fifth story, unfolding in a soft billowing which carried it gently the last couple of feet to the ground before the dead gaze of the giant Gulliver who was now faced with a blank wall of pale fabric rippling across with those shadows cast by the lights from the parking lot behind the gathered congregation of ghouls and ghosts and mummers who now thronged the open area as far back as the car park, some standing on top of the wall which fronted onto the road, every hollow eye fixed on the civic building whose whole front had disappeared behind a white curtain so that the front presented nothing but the blank face of a mausoleum, the building readily lending itself to the illusion, five stories rising square-faced in a blank precipice as if it had been waiting there since its inauguration for its own effacement, blinded by this sheet which was now overcast by a projection of blue, childish waves within which all sorts of marine creatures happily cavorted, the whole building submerged and over the top of which

Agnes now stood

stepping out to the edge of the lake precipice and this time she was indeed naked, shockingly so with her white body catching the light from the car park, shadowing her breasts across so that she appeared as if half of her was cut away into darkness, her body now precisely the sort that would stand as an heraldic pillar, a caryatid and

all this

in my mind’s eye the following morning when I read the account in the national paper, the

naked girl standing on the edge of the sunken mausoleum as if she were a statue carved to that purpose with the glare from beneath lighting up the juncture between her hips, as she stepped forward in full possession of the moment, upheld in the gaze of the assembled ghouls, everyone teetering on the edge of some climactic gesture that would clinch the whole spectacle into a coherent act of political protest, something which, if not equal to the city’s confusion would be at least dramatic and striking enough to illustrate how it had the collective wit to gather itself for this moment in which she would either fall or take flight, the only options when you have walked this close to the edge with

the picture on the front page showing her with her arms outspread and tipping forward off the edge of the building, the image catching her at the precise moment her feet leave the edge of the building and gravity takes hold of her as she begins to plunge through the night air, the expressions on the faces of the onlookers still calm as their reactions lag a full second behind she who is already in mid-flight with

my own heart skipping a beat to see her stalled for a split second in mid-air before plunging through the blackened light onto the hidden air cushion beneath which swelled out of the ground, appearing to engulf her as she landed in its centre so that it rose up around her, swallowing her in a soft tumorous growth in front of the building, the gasp from the crowd simultaneous with the curved folds of the cushion rising up around her, as if the crowd’s shock gave it the substance to billow up towards my blue-skinned daughter before it gradually subsided and she was raised up on a small plinth within the dying bloom to emerge as a kind of Venus on the half-shell from beneath the blue projected waves of the lake that rippled across her body and