Fergus Allen
The Dartry Dye Works
I often walked past the Dartry Dye Works,
three storeys of dark limestone, known as calp,
the name spelled out in large capital letters
of blue and white enamel—
D
A
R
T
R
Y
D
Y
E
W
O
R
K
S
It was just to the right beyond the tram sheds
where the tarred road sloped down to the Dodder
(a river liable to flashy floods
from its heathery catchment in Glencree).
Ash and sycamores stood around it, breathing:
I never saw anyone leave or enter,
but steam often flowed from a rusty pipe
that stuck out sideways through the north wall,
so there was surely something going on.
I now believe they only dyed things black.
That would be for the aftermath of death
and to see people through their times of mourning.
Once black, of course, there was no reverting
to burgundy or beige or powder blue,
which explains all those sombre-looking people
hanging around the Lower Rathmines Road
after making their vows and intercessions.
There is never any shortage of blackness
among the stage props of revealed religions.
Blackness is something abstract, like an absence;
but on nights without stars or electricity
when the curtained sky is up to nothing,
the pupils of a dreamer's eyes can shrink
against the glare of sunlight on a hillside
across which he finds himself on the move.
Reaching a station is not the end, though,
only another beginning, from which
he sets off once more in the wrong direction.
There are no seats, no bulbs in the light-sockets
and the tunnel is tortuous and black.
Emerging into unprepared-for light
the world he finds himself in is the image
of the one he left with such a commotion.
Deep under his feet in dolomite caves
explored only by hearty speleologists
lives a creature, Leucippus, pale and blind,
the size of his little finger with legs,
whose life is lived as though in Indian ink.
Slithering gingerly through the lime water,
black is a word for which it has no use.
Nor is absence what it would call its lot.
In the abyssal trench it's much the same;
phosporescence is merely self-advertisement,
not a lighting up of dismal surroundings;
while the drizzle of decomposing debris
from those that feed and spawn up there in daylight
is little more than fertilizing rain
falling in endless night. So black is best—
to which I'd add least seen, soonest forgotten .
Another just invented motto says
the sweetest songs come from the blackest birds.
In Palmerston Park they whistled their titles
over the heads of children, who were keener
on playing tig and hide-and-seek than listening
to the fowles' parliament; but when the bell
rang out for closing time, the darkness studied them
on their way home past the Dartry Dye Works.
Fergus Allen, Gas Light & Coke, The Dedalus Press, 2006.