Unpacked

While driving from Dublin to Wexford, I've often noticed a certain long-disused petrol pump, standing like a lone sentry on an abandoned forecourt. Of course it's a photographic cliché. Nevertheless, I often thought of stopping to snap it, despite it being in a place that's inconvenient to pull in to, or out from. The N11 is a busy road and, once on it, the instinct is to keep one's place in the slipstream. But I am conscious of how much the landscape nearby is altering (yet again), with a new stretch of motorway soon nearing completion barely a stone's throw away. Every driver has their personal landmarks or milestones, eidetic little signposts whose rooted persistence has earned them their places in memory.

So, this time I pulled in and parked, with Lola bouncing up on the back seat, wondering what gave. After photographing the pump, I noticed the house nearby. Here's what was upstairs, as if a certain guest had just unpacked, laying out cobwebs, mildew and dusty sunbeams, the heady smells of departure. More here by the way.

The wonderful Derek Mahon comes to mind, naturally enough, as he has written many poems about abandoned places and things, most notably in his justly famous 'An Abandoned Shed In Co. Wexford' and its sequel, 'A Garage In Co. Cork', from which I've taken the following stanzas (if you haven't got Mahon's Collected, buy it immediately):

"Where did they go? South Boston? Cricklewood?
Somebody somewhere thinks of this as home,
Remembering the old pumps where they stood,
Antique now, squirting juice into a cream
Lagonda or a dung-caked tractor while
A cloud swam on a cloud-reflecting tile.

Surely a whitewashed sun-trap at the back
Gave way to hens, wild thyme, and the first few
Shadowy yards of an overgrown cart track,
Tyres in the branches such as Noah knew.
Beyond, a swoop of mountain where you heard,
Disconsolate in the haze, a single blackbird.

Left to itself, the functional will cast
A death-bed glow of picturesque abandon.
The intact antiquities of the recent past,
Dropped from the retail catalogues, return
To the materials that gave rise to them
And shine with a late sacramental gleam.

A god who spent the night here once rewarded
Natural courtesy with eternal life,
Changing to petrol pumps, that they be spared
For ever there, an old man and his wife.
The virgin who escaped his dark design
Sanctions the townland from her prickly shrine."