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