Joycepoem

25 July 2007

No bad eminence this, Lord Belvedere’s hill, and the house, a Jesuit perch, from whose broad upper window I watch the city. A minute’s trail downslope, and your Centre offers decorum, celebrity and pamphlets – as though to mime, so late in the piece, the Church you couldn’t stand. A swing on the heel would take your ghost through a modern thicket – the buffed-up-bar for cubs of the Celtic Tiger, some corner shops, their dust in amber, boom of construction, a placard for lapdancing – to museums of seeing, writing, saying, and the little park from which by night or day the Children of Lir rise for the dead. Ironic hunter, you’d bag it, every morsel. Stalker of streets, scuffer of pavements, dawdler on bridges, prowler by close and parade, you bought the place for habitat and made it all domain. And now you share it, wary as ever but hungry still, with Lilliput’s master, the tangle-hearted Swift, your better at scorn, your brother in laughter, a singleton like yourself in the press of crowds. By O’Connell Street, by Stephen’s Green, by Dolphin’s Barn, Kilmainham, and Phoenix Park, you’re out with your wits about you for game, while the rain of matter falls from one soft day to the next, and you drink as though mortal. A moody harlequin, you dander the banks of Anna Livia Plurabelle, tracing now the lozenge of furious red, and now sable’s badge of your being unseen – feral and brilliant, come of a darker selvage than took the Florentine aback and sent him God knows where. Your golden thread is the tainted stream itself, the walk's ravines, the mouth of your mind as fluent as the traffic by Trinity’s walls. A one-man-fugue, you move by cadence, interval, revision: by climax deferred, and silence courted. Everything melts, as though to the Grand Canal, commanded and lost, measure by measure. Gulls have come over Parnell Square, to raise ‘the screaming practice of their peace’, and newly-landed Americans are shuttling in and out of your shrine, a cane someone’s caduceus come down in the world, a guidebook feathered in winter sunshine. Singer of flesh and its withering, mind and its fall, there are worse places to be than this one, your

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Joycepoem

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