Entry into a Book of Illuminations by John Barton

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.