i.
I've come.
The curved facade simplifies the cobblestones,
Doubles the ringing air.
How shall I shackle this clamor of gathering images
So I can slow-pace the galleries
And let delight happen like ceremony?
At the door, abashed
As apparitions stream to mind, I falter
Toward a gallery of glass
To summon distance,
But there they are-eight "Irish Literary Figures."
The wet colors swim and blur, and I smile hard,
Hand gripping a kind of cold wood rail
To keep from being mocked by the hard Irish.
Their voices turn me out upon Epstein's bronze
Of an old woman
In whom I find that gaiety glittering
That brims Picasso's eyes
And steadies me against assaults of mockery.
ii.
Haggard, gaunt with some unspeakable emptiness,
She stares into her sorrow.
As if it had been my own, I remember.
Lifting my hand, I touch her bound hair,
Trace the animal medallion at her ear.
How could you not love him
Whose celebrations mastered your stern comeliness?
Granting is easy: asking, so full of shame.
Can anyone now allay the dead grief
That hollows your eyes, lady?
My hand slips.
I remark the big portrait
Where, luminous with youth, she leans
To a pet monkey. She is amused.
She mocks the artist.
Love is a dress she wears indoors,
Chastity is a sash.
Wagons, great wheels, turn in the streets, spilling straw,
Drag angry queens, drag beggars through crowds, coughing.
She willed that. She could have been content-
Luck equaled her impulse.
But her crimes lacked sweetness, festive ease.
iii.
Sentences!
Who am I, with what authority come here
Before long-legged Yeats
To blame her in some phrase?
Only the long authority of love,
Whose argument is thin enough, God knows.
iv.
Standish O'Grady's a handsome man, I think-
Blocked face like a stony challenge;
Douglas Hyde, his blue eyes brightening out of the canvas;
And in blue paint himself, John Yeats,
The sainted painter-father, late of New York,
His Willie a blur, mild as this John Synge.
Lady Gregory's portrait's creased-
Black silk barred and sunlight full of lines;
Hugh Lane-
"Who's all them Yeetses, luv? If they didn't paint it
they're in it." "Come along, will lya, to the one that
moves, Harry, all stripes."
Who's Irish, for God's sake?
v.
I can't see anything.
The flooding colors hammer in the air
And steepen, right and left.
The light spins. It's tangible. Does this room end
In an imagined Ireland?
If everything's remembered, when did it begin?
Stricken, I sink down, mantling my heart.
And this too was foreknown!
I am, myself, the imagined fact, frozen outside of time.
vi.
Late afternoon Dublin's gray, all right, and dirty.
A cold sun dapples a plain memorial pool
And the Irish cram their benches, remembering.
Tonight, at moonless midnight,
At the dark where no human life if possible,
The stunned sky will fill with fireflakes a gain,
Deepening blue,
Trembling to stillness.