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October 31 WaterIf you take the train along the coast into Dublin, you can see
the sea pretty close up. Picture a track with just enough room for two trains to pass, with a high wall on one side, and a short wall on the other, and then picture the sea.
It's a thick, shiny metal grey sea, the same height as the window of the train, and no more than twelve feet away just over an ordinary little wall. Today its an angry sea, because it's cold, with sleet on the Wicklow hills, and the surface is no mirror flat blue, but this boiling metal that leaps up and around in sharp peaks and troughs, billows and breakers, sucking and blowing and throwing up spume at the top of which little marbles of water are pitched upwards to tickle the feet of gulls who seem to make a game of ducking and then leaping away from them like kids on a tideline. Now and then, an especially enthusiastic wave breaks over the wall and sprays the side of the train with brine, and the wall is breached here and there with runnels of sea water. What happens in the true heart of winter when the storms are flying is a mystery - how could the train possibly run? The track would be flooded and overwhelmed, shells and fish flapping and cracking along the rails - and Lord only knows about the electrics!
Later, I manage to get some time to myself in Dublin, well relatively anyway. I'm in the Writer's museum, looking at typewriters that wrote the original 'This' or the first draft of 'that'. With the writer's things - a suit, a beer mug, a pair of glasses, a typewriter allegedly thrown through a pub window by Brendan Behan' - behind glass for our perusal, as if they were somehow clues to what made them able to write as they did. I like it for the silence and the beautiful old building, the temporary respite from noise and clamour, the chance to let my mind hum along its own lines, taking your hand through the rooms and the glass cases, smiling at you, grimacing, letting the scent of the scant sunshine through the glass, the colours on the odd illuminated page, the ink, the black and white photos curl between us like fog.
My mind hums like a machine on standby, the engine ticking over but the microchip still, one light blinking. This is peace of a temporary sort, within which the bare bones of peace can begin to clothe themselves again.
The Brandy Glass
Only let it form within his hands once more -
The moment cradled like a brandy glass.
Sitting alone in the empty dining hall . . .
From the chandeliers the snow begins to fall
Piling around carafes and table legs
And chokes the passage of the revolving door.
The last diner, like a ventriloquist's doll
Left by his master, gazes before him, begs:
'Only let it form within my hands once more.'
Louis Macneice.
I even managed to walk along Grafton Street:
'In Grafton Street in November, we tripped lightly along the ledge. . .'
sadly, Grafton Street is a shopping centre full of brightly lit shops, but never mind.......
' . . . when the angel woos, the clay, he'll lose, his wings at the dawn of day...'
Bydda i'n aros amdana ti am byth os oes angen Cariad. Be well.
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