HJS |
MTC CRONIN Bloom for James Joyce Coffee, is smelled by the stomach, first thing this morning when back to shore in my boat after dragging all night the long blue net of the dream, catching divinity (they have colleges for that and fish to fill them!) but what is this but real-life all round and my feet down that way as the response of an organism to the stimulus of gravity and my arms tryin' to grab up there as if water was to be had, as if heavenly roots making of the tree a palindrome in three dimensions with branches in the earth and sky--I'll put my glasses on and see if that's a difference or if the way I spin is just the influence of rotation or is the living of me squirming under this big stone they set upon when I was but a child, I never crawled but walked on my knees in their house of cupboards where the drawers full of haecceity for all and money, that thing unlike many others, which can lose all mean- ing tomorrow, took some down to enchant- ment leaving fingerprints full of whales and wheels and whorls? don't yet know if people are shy or unconscious but nobody in my street asked for my name that grand day of life. The Ice Game As Genet knew, ice does not resist warmth; nothing dresses itself so beautifully in thoughts: Yeats with his writerly messages; Joyce, the scallywag, sitting with Dante to lunch; Wallace Stevens's perfect commas making handfuls for the philosophers to pause and munch. Such pleasure! Such games! that as usual the ladies have put their heads in the door and left after counting the pages--Emily, Ann, Sylvia, Denise--gone off to bury their fathers' and husbands' names. What work digging! Such graves! © MTC Cronin |
volume 3, issue 2, 2003 |