The Red Carpark

Here's your swarm and your huge beehive.
Welcome to that there's roughly five
billion like you alive.

Josef Brodsky, 'Song of Welcome'


"Remember we're in the Red
Carpark, Level 2." Led

astray again, I forgot
myself in the hypnotic

conveyances, glassy lifts
rising like prayer-bubbles, criss-

crossing diagonals, so many lights
of reason, so many flights

in fabrics, plastics, such drawers
within drawers (and so many mirrors),

such resolute turnings of backs
on silence, the great green and black

spaces. No wonder our fears
flourish, secured, their shares

rising and rising,
no wonder we dread re-entering

our narrow, time-leased flats
in Nowhere: the welcomless mat.

God, Nature, Whatever
put us together: you pest!

Our minds need more and more
places where we exist less.


As it happens, I wrote that poem about a year ago (long before our fledgling Great Recession), whereas this photo was taken just last week. The location is the same, the Red Carpark, Level 2 in Dundrum shopping mall, south Dublin, the biggest, newest cathedral to acquisitiveness, and to that subterranean (largely youthful) social life that flourished well after I had grown too old for it to mean much to me. But the place was in fact strangely deserted for five in the evening, the carpark largely empty, a slightly disturbing reality staring us in the face: the boom has well and truly bitten the dust.