Conor Murphy reflects on The Bend in the Road

Conor Murphy offers a personal reflection on a poem that resonates strongly with his childhood memories

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems are famously oblique; we enter into a personal contract with them where we all agree to disagree, where the poems guide us but don’t dictate to us. When we study them, we open them out, let the images, juxtapositions, themes, forms and syntax take us, blindfolded, to wherever our inner selves decide. Poems don’t necessarily have to have a single, specific, meaning. The best ones don’t. The best ones let us participate.

Often when I teach one of her poems, I find my mind wandering off, plucking at her images and placing them next to my own, from my memories, my hopes, my fears.

One such poem is ‘The Bend in the Road’. I can’t help but be brought back to a time when I was a small child, maybe five years old maybe six. ‘This is the place where the child

Felt sick in the car and they pulled over’

I was the boy. Newly moved back to Ireland my parents, Dubs originally, were looking around, trying different ways to fit into their new Cork surroundings. This day it was a drag hunt. ‘And waited in the shadow of a house’

After the drag hunt was the pub. Feeling unwell I was sent to the car and instructed to “leave the window down a bit, to let the air in”. That’d cure me.

Darkness fell and the car filled up. Two sisters, two parents and me. I got the window

ANGRY ADULTS ARGUING ON THE BEND IN THE ROAD IN DARKNESS, HEADLIGHTS ILLUMINATING THEIR TROUSER LEGS

seat and ‘opened the windows and breathed’. I wasn’t better.

My nausea didn’t abate and grew intense. Dad turned to ask if he should pull over. Was I sure I was going to get sick?

I could only nod.

In his turning back, the bend arrived and so did an oncoming car. Concern for his son, darkness, having turned, all disorientated my Dad and he ended up on the wrong side of the road. A moment of panic. A swerve. Brakes applied.

It wasn’t head on. Both drivers moved swiftly to avoid collision. No seat belts in the back but childish bodies didn’t collide either. I had gripped the door, pushed my face against the window. We still occupied ‘the airy space’. A beat.

Dad got out to apologise. The driver was angry. Angry adults arguing on the bend in the road in darkness, headlights illuminating their trouser legs. Mum simply asked me “Are you all right. Do you want to get out? Do you want to get sick? Do you need to get sick?”

‘A tall tree like a cat’s tail waited too.’

I was by the ditch, beneath the tree, praying that I’d be sick. The angry adults were my fault. I needed to be sick to prove the accident was unavoidable, necessary. Guilt came up but no vomit.

‘..the road is as silent as ever it was on that day.’

My wife drives the family car, I sit in the passenger seat. We’ve returned to Cork, as my parents had returned to Ireland. We passed down a country road, passed a pub with a carpark, a new playground next to it. They seemed familiar but it was beyond the pub, the bend in the road, that I recognised.

‘The tree is taller, the house is quite covered’ Three children in the back. They know nothing of life before seatbelts. The road is bright now, and wider. We only ever pass it in daylight, never when it is dark.

The guilt is always there, in that place.

‘This is the place of their presence: in the tree, in the air.’