Paper Scissors Stone

Handwriting

34 Handwriting for T.K.W. To start with o’Connell Bridge and the River Liffey (leaning over on my stomach on August stone looking down) the currents drawn by sunlight (this choking weight, feet in mid-air) like the day in Jack Yeats’s ‘The Liffey Swim’, whose coral colours’ nervy flow you’ve never seen (dropping, ending it). To continue with All Hallows Church now called St. Andrews (the cold smell of sacred stone called him): ‘No Communion Today’. Then walk southward along Westland Row retracing those footsteps to Sweeney’s following the guidebook (sending you the sweet lemon soap?). After a rest, it is time for the Book of Kells (my books were never your kind of books) and a closer look at its illuminated vellum leaves: one bears a Buddha-like Madonna with the child cupped in her arms (his teal-blue top just like the fish-jade you carry round your neck for peace). A page-palette of colours: iris, lilac, egg yolk and lapis lazuli brushing against the lagoon of a Latinate ‘g’. Curtains drawn, a desk with a chair: it is time to start. (This postcard is a page from Book of Kells?) In the end you’d written: ‘Though we won’t see each other again, this is meant to last.’ (It did last, hidden in my wardrobe among your presents.) I should have gone on (all the way from you to here). 35 This is Dublin (how clearly your handwriting comes to mind before I can remember your face). outside, the human traffic dapples the busy street (this silence between us). Inside, two angels flutter in the background behind her halo (those shell-like feathers started clopping) and I stop. ...