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Dermot Healy at the Phillips
For the last half hour Healy’s been gone—
he’s digging up the potatoes he sees
in Rothko’s hazy fields of color, staring at them
from his bench, alone in their chapel at the Phillips.
Three days ago he turned a corner as we walked DC.
Helen and I found him in a tiny Arabic library that caught
his eye on N Street. So thrilled with the place,
he’s gone back each day to meander in obscure conversation
with scholars there about the first sounds
that made language, hints of them secreted still, he says,
on N Street in frail mystery-embedded manuscripts
that took his odd eye and confirmed what he holds
as his only faith: that every word is a
living entity with a soul of its own
that longs and morphs and heaves in its letters
sideways and forward chanting its history
in its agony of thanksgiving for living.
Healy has moved now from
Rothko’s potato chapel to a minuscule Klee
intricate in light blue lines. He’s traveling
inside its mysteries, multifarious in minutiae.
“Will we go home now for the tea?” he nudges.
In the short time of his stay, we’ve shaped a ritual
of tea round the Irish bread he found at the Dupont
Farmers Market. He cuts it thick and toasts it for us.
Then slathers it with butter and closes his eyes
in a way that puts the tea and toast
in league with the mysteries
of Rothko and of Klee.
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A set of poems by Michael Whelan, including “Dermot Healy at the Phillips,” on the late Irish poet and novelist, appeared in Éirways magazine. Whelan’s spiritual memoir After God, published in 2014, is a poetic story of a lifelong lovers’ quarrel with God. § Whelan won first prize in the juried Leitrim Guardian 2012 Literary Awards. His poems have appeared in The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Coachella Review, The Healing Muse, and The Little Patuxent Review. His prose work has been published in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and online on the Irish Central site. [For information on Dermot Healy, click here.]
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Rothko paintings at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
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Author: Terence Winch
