The Poetry Society

That day I travelled from Shankill 

By train, straight and cleanly, glided

Past seashores, backs of buildings,

Gardens of broken bicycles, sheds,

White sheets surrendering to the wind;

Arrived at last at Pearse, alighted

Then slouched with conscious accidie

Around enamelled wintry Dublin,

An out-of-season, out-of-sorts

Tripper, a writer shorn of images,

Trawling the streets for something

To take away the nothing, maybe

A gentle crawl around a bookshop,

Some scribbling in a pub or café,

A dawdle in the National Gallery.

At last in College Street an urge

To see the Book of Kells again,

For inspiration or displacement

So I hurried into Trinity

And joined a coachload making for

The warm and neon vestibule

Before the shrine itself.

 

Inside the inner sanctum

The light is soft and sepia

And voices turn to whispering;

I inch towards the open book

A segment of a weary snake

As dutiful as mourners filing past

A waxy rouged-up corpse.

I'm more excited than I think:

I know I'll only have a moment,

My eyes are twitched, my head is clear,

And suddenly I'm there, right there –

As if I've just been pushed on stage –

I look and see a dream embalmed

A lab of bubbling coloured tubes

A brain that's whirring inside out

Unconscious doodling gone mad

A skin with rose and woad tattoos

Or a body flayed of flesh –

Look, sinews, joints and arteries

And serpentine intestines –

St John looks stunned and slightly sad

Between the spinning cosmic cogs,

The fiery thrall of Catherine wheels;

And hydra-headed letters writhe

Within the creepy snares of ivy,

A harpist plucks an elongated C

Or is it a longship on its end?

And everywhere, everywhere,

The subatomic particles rejoice.

And then among the camouflage

I see emerge, like a chameleon,

In principio erat verbum,

I stare with such intensity

The edges of the letters vibrate.

 

I feel a nudge and shuffle on

Through doors, rejoin my century,

Buy cards, put off the cold outside.

The book, cut open like a strange new fruit,

Takes refuge in my memory,

Essentialized and submarine

Glowing beneath the thousand spores

Of viral thoughts, associations

Begetting word on word on word

Spawning within my brimming head

Intentions, messages

And endless trivial dialogues.

Yet even as I join the outside world

And rhythm of pedestrians,

Now and again a door swings

Open, as if by dint of random winds,

And a beam of medieval colour

Shafts into consciousness.

 

The wind that froze O'Connell Bridge

Blew through my coiled fevered brain

Released its images along

The Liffey, a mercurial gutter

Dividing the pages of the city.

Mapless, aimless, but trusting something

Would guide my footsteps fruitfully

I set off like a peregrinus

Into the straights and curves and turns

Of roads and streets and alleyways

Curious to see where I would end

Within this urban book of fate,

And in not knowing where to go

To feel a lifting of the will,

Of thoughts, relentless images.

 

In Nassau the horizontal sun

Drew out my shadow straight ahead,

I turned right into Dawson Street

Where In principio arose

So suddenly it caught me out

A beautiful pigmented wraith

Luminous on the ash-grey pavement,

Its blue initials framing formal gardens,

A Persian paradise, Versailles,

But with the R and I and N

Unable to escape the wheeze,

The clutch of bronchial spasm;

Left into Molesworth Street, then at

Kildare erat verbum seeped up

So unadorned and simple, calm,

That for the first time I thought

 

About the meaning of the words

Beyond the dazzling decoration

Which made me think about

Reality beyond a verbal meaning

And then these thoughts slipped off

To follow other looping paths

While I turned left and at the top

Turned right and right for Merrion Street

Past overcoated office workers

Not glancing past their routes to home,

Then right to find St Stephen's Green;

I puffed around the thinned-out park

Its trees stripped back to spiky railings

Then spun off north to Grafton Street

Among the lines of flowing shoppers

And, beyond them in the static margins,

A busker with a banjo and a dog

A hobo drinking from a silvery cup

An artist chalking Celtic patterns.

 

Footsore, pink-faced, I stepped outside

The vim of endless circulation

And entered Bewley's for some tea.

I bagged a corner seat, sat down

And let the steamy café warmth

Insinuate itself inside me ...

 

I took my pen and notepad out

Began to doodle loops and spirals,

Pulled out the postcards of the book

Itching to write, explore, create:

Chi Rho maintained a sort of blaze,

Erat autem was oddly jointed,

The crimson letters out of place;

Christ's tempting had a subtle drama,

And In principio still fresh

Was bolstered by the image in my mind.

 

And yet each repro seemed so flat

So casually reductionist

A blurry copy of the book

Itself a copy of creation

Creation, too, a copy of

The archetypes of God.

 

Why add another layer of words,

Intrude more chaff between myself

And ultimate reality?

 

I leant back, sighed, deflated at

The thought of the enormity

Of engaging the Invisible –

The Truth, or Word or Verbum –

Through the imagination.

What was the Verbum anyway?

A god or principle? Can we

Describe, revere the disincarnate?

 

And as I mused I doodled, drew

The Word, for fun, in human form,

A female face with long black hair

High cheekbones like a goddess

Athena, Isis or Sophia,

An open mouth – for after all

She was the Word. And soon the sketch

Became increasingly baroque

I drew a flowing pleated dress

Crosshatching round her body

That turned to squiggly knotwork

Hypnotic in its self-creation;

Relaxing in its endlessness

I felt a whoosh of letting go

And glancing at my doodled Word

She seemed more three-dimensional,

Her eyes were brighter than before –

And as I looked at them I thought

I saw them blink: I held the reverie

And focused softly on her face

And as I stared I saw her mouth

Begin to move, articulating speech:

I listened carefully and heard

Her speak, or something speak, these words:

 

'They meditated, fasted, prayed

To see the glory of my light

But when I did not come to them

They tried to incarnate me in

The flesh of their imaginations.

 

'No art can ever make me live.

And yet they forged a golden calf

From herds of steaming, stamping cattle,

From minerals, plants and insects' blood.

From life they wrought dead fantasies

Of what I never can become –

They could not face my naked being

Because it would have been the mirror

Of empty days, deserted nights,

Winds wailing for an absent god,

When mumbled repetitious prayers

Crawled like moribund flies

Around their oratories unheeded.

They had to fill the awful void,

Squeeze every chink of nothing out –

Horror vacui, that was their hell

And why they clothed me in masks

And brooches, necklaces, jewels,

Till I became a blowzy Jezebel.

The restless spirits of the monks

Are trapped inside the book, and seek

 

Redemption from their muzzled piety

A voice to shout the honest shout

Of dread, despair and apathy,

Of the selfish frailty of flesh

Against the geometric finery

They thought embodied what I am.

 

'Remember this: I do not have

A name or face, or form,

And words and paint prolong the lie

That I can be depicted: I am beyond

All sense of what 'beyond' can mean.

To know me you must close your eyes

And leave the road of affirmation,

The road of thinking and imagining:

Just be a pilgrim to yourself,

Alert, not knowing where to go,

But trusting in your ignorance

And travelling inward all the time.

Watch out for clues and signs – observe

The spirals of your thoughts curl round,

The interlace of hopes and fears

Feed off each other endlessly,

The circles of your good intentions

Revolving ineffectually,

The nibbling mice of jealousy

And hissing serpent of resentment –

Just watch your convoluting self

Proliferate without your intervening

Until it dies away to nothing

But silence and a glowing stillness,

As a stone exudes warm summer light;

And in that pregnant emptiness

You may just glimpse me

But only unexpectedly

Like a half glance at a sunshaft

Erupting in a neighbouring field;

And if you see me you've become

The unstained love you sought in me –

Then who is who?

The eyes through which you see are mine.'

 

Just then a waitress took my tray

And for a second I looked up

And broke the spell. The doodled Word

Lay silent on the page.

Remembering what she'd said

I could not help but feel upset

That she could not be touched by words.

So what then can a writer do?

Just glorify mundane quotidiana?

Or strain to reach the ultimate

Knowing attempts to give it flesh

Will render it more dead than live?

 

I looked down at the Word again,

Still dead among the spiralled doodles

Yet more alive, it struck me then,

For all my careless sketching

Than paintings from the Book of Kells,

Caged under glass and reproduced

To an attenuated death.

It came to me true art is something done

And not received, an act of love

A letting go, a graceful rush

A not-knowing what will happen next,

An ambush of our consciousness:

The scribes, illuminators

Were caught up in their flame of art

And it's that flame we need and not their art

To find our being in that love

So finding art in all we do

In all our actions, gestures, thoughts,

No matter how mundane or small.

 

I turned the pages in my notepad

Excited, churned by thoughts and yet

Relieved to see the Verbum gone

And soothing blankness in her place.

A font of endless possibilities,

The paper held me like a crystal ball.

I stared, more thoughts flew up, took shape

About imagination versus truth,

Articulation versus silence;

And pulled in opposite directions

I let the paper flood me with its white

Benevolence of void,

Waited to see what would occur:

The paper darkened slightly in the centre,

The profile of a rock, perhaps,

Or an island rising from the sea,

And gradually it came to me:

Iona brightening through a mist

A sudden wave of sun striking

The Cove of the Coracle,

Its sand and pebbles washed by foam,

The screams of gulls like cries of dying men

Then higher up I saw a cliff

Long grass spread-eagled by the wind

A beaten path that wound inland

A path that led me on and on.