Entry into a Book of Illuminations
by John Barton
You returned uninvited.
At first I refused
to admit
you then, without reason, I opened
the door.
You stepped through
hardened by the charms, which
unlike your coat I thought
I had asked
you to shed.
Whatever the air
between us, it still was not raining.
Leaves were not about to fall into the wind.
A table divided us.
Its surface was rough
unworn by elbows and years of easy talk.
Your face might have been
a decoration hung
in the dark of that room
in a distant century
before which monk would have lit
candles, perhaps incense, the finely scribed
lines of your countenance penciled
with shadow, the colours
of your fixed expression mixed from what was
kept to hand: red lead, indigo, white chalk, the eyes remote
orbs of lapis quarried in Afghanistan
They glanced up
from the spread leaves of a folio about St. Colum Cille
I browsed in a bookstore on Dawson Street
in Dublin, a few thousand
miles from where we sat an age ago, our unoccupied
silence a new world one of us would
shortly bring
to an end.
At the time we lived in our own century.
We saw ourselves as social constructs.
We were self
made men.
One of us contrived
to bring up the weather, the brush fires
the realized fears of drought.
But what we felt was ageless
had everything to do with
faith not contingency
two gallants whose flaw it was
to start what one too soon could not
go on with, the other met
by the face of the beloved everywhere written
in the bone structure of the dead
illuminating the great tomes of Ireland
their descendants at The George—
kindred faces
suspended above the pint glasses of Guinness
or bitter lemon, ubiquitous
behind the exacting maquillage of the pub’s house drag queen.
I no longer know which country inhabits you.
I should have never let you in.
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