Ulysses

—­You, Cochrane, what city sent for him?

—­Tarentum, sir.

—­Very good.  Well?

—­There was a battle, sir.

—­Very good.  Where?

The boy’s blank face asked the blank window.

Fabled by the daughters of memory.  And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it.  A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake’s wings of excess.  I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame.  What’s left us then?

—­I forget the place, sir. 279 B. C.

—­Asculum, Stephen said, glancing at the name and date in the gorescarred book.

—­Yes, sir.  And he said:  Another victory like that and we are done for.

That phrase the world had remembered.  A dull ease of the mind.  From a hill above a corpsestrewn plain a general speaking to his officers, leaned upon his spear.  Any general to any officers.  They lend ear.

—­You, Armstrong, Stephen said.  What was the end of Pyrrhus?

—­End of Pyrrhus, sir?

—­I know, sir.  Ask me, sir, Comyn said.

—­Wait.  You, Armstrong.  Do you know anything about Pyrrhus?

A bag of figrolls lay snugly in Armstrong’s satchel.  He curled them between his palms at whiles and swallowed them softly.  Crumbs adhered to the tissue of his lips.  A sweetened boy’s breath.  Welloff people, proud that their eldest son was in the navy.  Vico road, Dalkey.

—­Pyrrhus, sir?  Pyrrhus, a pier.

All laughed.  Mirthless high malicious laughter.  Armstrong looked round at his classmates, silly glee in profile.  In a moment they will laugh more loudly, aware of my lack of rule and of the fees their papas pay.

—­Tell me now, Stephen said, poking the boy’s shoulder with the book, what is a pier.

—­A pier, sir, Armstrong said.  A thing out in the water.  A kind of a bridge.  Kingstown pier, sir.

Some laughed again:  mirthless but with meaning.  Two in the back bench whispered.  Yes.  They knew:  had never learned nor ever been innocent.  All.  With envy he watched their faces:  Edith, Ethel, Gerty, Lily.  Their likes:  their breaths, too, sweetened with tea and jam, their bracelets tittering in the struggle.

—­Kingstown pier, Stephen said.  Yes, a disappointed bridge.

The words troubled their gaze.

—­How, sir?  Comyn asked.  A bridge is across a river.

For Haines’s chapbook.  No-one here to hear.  Tonight deftly amid wild drink and talk, to pierce the polished mail of his mind.  What then?  A jester at the court of his master, indulged and disesteemed, winning a clement master’s praise.  Why had they chosen all that part?  Not wholly for the smooth caress.  For them too history was a tale like any other too often heard, their land a pawnshop.

Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death.  They are not to be thought away.  Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted.  But can those have been possible seeing that they never were?  Or was that only possible which came to pass?  Weave, weaver of the wind.

—­Tell us a story, sir.

—­O, do, sir.  A ghoststory.

—­Where do you begin in this?  Stephen asked, opening another book.

—­Weep no more, Comyn said.

—­Go on then, Talbot.

—­And the story, sir?

—­After, Stephen said.  Go on, Talbot.

A swarthy boy opened a book and propped it nimbly under the breastwork of his satchel.  He recited jerks of verse with odd glances at the text: 

  —­Weep no more, woful shepherds, weep no more
    for LYCIDAS, your sorrow, is not dead,
    sunk though he be beneath the watery floor ...

It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible.  Aristotle’s phrase formed itself within the gabbled verses and floated out into the studious silence of the library of Saint Genevieve where he had read, sheltered from the sin of Paris, night by night.  By his elbow a delicate Siamese conned a handbook of strategy.  Fed and feeding brains about me:  under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers:  and in my mind’s darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds.  Thought is the thought of thought.  Tranquil brightness.  The soul is in a manner all that is:  the soul is the form of forms.  Tranquility sudden, vast, candescent:  form of forms.

Talbot repeated: 

  —­Through the dear might of him that walked the waves,
    through the dear might ...

—­Turn over, Stephen said quietly.  I don’t see anything.

—­What, sir?  Talbot asked simply, bending forward.

His hand turned the page over.  He leaned back and went on again, having just remembered.  Of him that walked the waves.  Here also over these craven hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffer’s heart and lips and on mine.  It lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the tribute.  To Caesar what is Caesar’s, to God what is God’s.  A long look from dark eyes, a riddling sentence to be woven and woven on the church’s looms.  Ay.

    RIDDLE me, riddle me, randy ro. 
    My father gave me seeds to sow.

Talbot slid his closed book into his satchel.

—­Have I heard all?  Stephen asked.

—­Yes, sir.  Hockey at ten, sir.

—­Half day, sir.  Thursday.

—­Who can answer a riddle?  Stephen asked.

They bundled their books away, pencils clacking, pages rustling.  Crowding together they strapped and buckled their satchels, all gabbling gaily: 

—­A riddle, sir?  Ask me, sir.

—­O, ask me, sir.

—­A hard one, sir.

—­This is the riddle, Stephen said: 

    The cock crew,
    the sky was blue: 
    The bells in heaven
    were striking eleven. 
    ’Tis time for this poor soul
    to go to heaven.

What is that?

—­What, sir?

—­Again, sir.  We didn’t hear.

Their eyes grew bigger as the lines were repeated.  After a silence
Cochrane said: 

—­What is it, sir?  We give it up.

Stephen, his throat itching, answered: 

—­The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush.

He stood up and gave a shout of nervous laughter to which their cries echoed dismay.

A stick struck the door and a voice in the corridor called: 

—­Hockey!

They broke asunder, sidling out of their benches, leaping them.  Quickly they were gone and from the lumberroom came the rattle of sticks and clamour of their boots and tongues.

Sargent who alone had lingered came forward slowly, showing an open copybook.  His thick hair and scraggy neck gave witness of unreadiness and through his misty glasses weak eyes looked up pleading.  On his cheek, dull and bloodless, a soft stain of ink lay, dateshaped, recent and damp as a snail’s bed.

He held out his copybook.  The word SUMS was written on the headline.  Beneath were sloping figures and at the foot a crooked signature with blind loops and a blot.  Cyril Sargent:  his name and seal.

—­Mr Deasy told me to write them out all again, he said, and show them to you, sir.

Stephen touched the edges of the book.  Futility.

—­Do you understand how to do them now? he asked.

—­Numbers eleven to fifteen, Sargent answered.  Mr Deasy said I was to copy them off the board, sir.

—­Can you do them. yourself?  Stephen asked.

—­No, sir.

Ugly and futile:  lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail’s bed.  Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart.  But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail.  She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own.  Was that then real?  The only true thing in life?  His mother’s prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode.  She was no more:  the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes.  She had saved him from being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been.  A poor soul gone to heaven:  and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.

Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem.  He proves by algebra that Shakespeare’s ghost is Hamlet’s grandfather.  Sargent peered askance through his slanted glasses.  Hockeysticks rattled in the lumberroom:  the hollow knock of a ball and calls from the field.

Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes.  Give hands, traverse, bow to partner:  so:  imps of fancy of the Moors.  Gone too from the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.

—­Do you understand now?  Can you work the second for yourself?

—­Yes, sir.

In long shaky strokes Sargent copied the data.  Waiting always for a word of help his hand moved faithfully the unsteady symbols, a faint hue of shame flickering behind his dull skin.  Amor MATRIS:  subjective and objective genitive.  With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had fed him and hid from sight of others his swaddling bands.

Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness.  My childhood bends beside me.  Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly.  Mine is far and his secret as our eyes.  Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts:  secrets weary of their tyranny:  tyrants, willing to be dethroned.

The sum was done.

—­It is very simple, Stephen said as he stood up.

—­Yes, sir.  Thanks, Sargent answered.

He dried the page with a sheet of thin blottingpaper and carried his copybook back to his bench.

—­You had better get your stick and go out to the others, Stephen said as he followed towards the door the boy’s graceless form.

—­Yes, sir.

In the corridor his name was heard, called from the playfield.

—­Sargent!

—­Run on, Stephen said.  Mr Deasy is calling you.

He stood in the porch and watched the laggard hurry towards the scrappy field where sharp voices were in strife.  They were sorted in teams and Mr Deasy came away stepping over wisps of grass with gaitered feet.  When he had reached the schoolhouse voices again contending called to him.  He turned his angry white moustache.

—­What is it now? he cried continually without listening.

—­Cochrane and Halliday are on the same side, sir, Stephen said.

—­Will you wait in my study for a moment, Mr Deasy said, till I restore order here.

And as he stepped fussily back across the field his old man’s voice cried sternly: 

—­What is the matter?  What is it now?

Their sharp voices cried about him on all sides:  their many forms closed round him, the garish sunshine bleaching the honey of his illdyed head.

Stale smoky air hung in the study with the smell of drab abraded leather of its chairs.  As on the first day he bargained with me here.  As it was in the beginning, is now.  On the sideboard the tray of Stuart coins, base treasure of a bog:  and ever shall be.  And snug in their spooncase of purple plush, faded, the twelve apostles having preached to all the gentiles:  world without end.

A hasty step over the stone porch and in the corridor.  Blowing out his rare moustache Mr Deasy halted at the table.

—­First, our little financial settlement, he said.

He brought out of his coat a pocketbook bound by a leather thong.  It slapped open and he took from it two notes, one of joined halves, and laid them carefully on the table.

—­Two, he said, strapping and stowing his pocketbook away.

And now his strongroom for the gold.  Stephen’s embarrassed hand moved over the shells heaped in the cold stone mortar:  whelks and money cowries and leopard shells:  and this, whorled as an emir’s turban, and this, the scallop of saint James.  An old pilgrim’s hoard, dead treasure, hollow shells.

A sovereign fell, bright and new, on the soft pile of the tablecloth.

—­Three, Mr Deasy said, turning his little savingsbox about in his hand.  These are handy things to have.  See.  This is for sovereigns.  This is for shillings.  Sixpences, halfcrowns.  And here crowns.  See.

He shot from it two crowns and two shillings.

—­Three twelve, he said.  I think you’ll find that’s right.

—­Thank you, sir, Stephen said, gathering the money together with shy haste and putting it all in a pocket of his trousers.

—­No thanks at all, Mr Deasy said.  You have earned it.

Stephen’s hand, free again, went back to the hollow shells.  Symbols too of beauty and of power.  A lump in my pocket:  symbols soiled by greed and misery.

—­Don’t carry it like that, Mr Deasy said.  You’ll pull it out somewhere and lose it.  You just buy one of these machines.  You’ll find them very handy.

Answer something.

—­Mine would be often empty, Stephen said.

The same room and hour, the same wisdom:  and I the same.  Three times now.  Three nooses round me here.  Well?  I can break them in this instant if I will.

—­Because you don’t save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger.  You don’t know yet what money is.  Money is power.  When you have lived as long as I have.  I know, I know.  If youth but knew.  But what does Shakespeare say?  Put but money in thy purse.

—­Iago, Stephen murmured.

He lifted his gaze from the idle shells to the old man’s stare.

—­He knew what money was, Mr Deasy said.  He made money.  A poet, yes, but an Englishman too.  Do you know what is the pride of the English?  Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman’s mouth?

The seas’ ruler.  His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay:  it seems history is to blame:  on me and on my words, unhating.

—­That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets.

—­Ba!  Mr Deasy cried.  That’s not English.  A French Celt said that.  He tapped his savingsbox against his thumbnail.

—­I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast.  I paid my way.

Good man, good man.

—­I paid my way.  I never borrowed A shilling in my life.  Can you feel that?  I owe nothing.  Can you?

Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties.  Curran, ten guineas.  McCann, one guinea.  Fred Ryan, two shillings.  Temple, two lunches.  Russell, one guinea, Cousins, ten shillings, Bob Reynolds, half a guinea, Koehler, three guineas, Mrs MacKernan, five weeks’ board.  The lump I have is useless.

—­For the moment, no, Stephen answered.

Mr Deasy laughed with rich delight, putting back his savingsbox.

—­I knew you couldn’t, he said joyously.  But one day you must feel it.  We are a generous people but we must also be just.

—­I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

Mr Deasy stared sternly for some moments over the mantelpiece at the shapely bulk of a man in tartan filibegs:  Albert Edward, prince of Wales.

—­You think me an old fogey and an old tory, his thoughtful voice said.  I saw three generations since O’Connell’s time.  I remember the famine in ’46.  Do you know that the orange lodges agitated for repeal of the union twenty years before O’Connell did or before the prelates of your communion denounced him as a demagogue?  You fenians forget some things.

Glorious, pious and immortal memory.  The lodge of Diamond in Armagh the splendid behung with corpses of papishes.  Hoarse, masked and armed, the planters’ covenant.  The black north and true blue bible.  Croppies lie down.

Stephen sketched a brief gesture.

—­I have rebel blood in me too, Mr Deasy said.  On the spindle side.  But I am descended from sir John Blackwood who voted for the union.  We are all Irish, all kings’ sons.

—­Alas, Stephen said.

—­Per VIAS RECTAS, Mr Deasy said firmly, was his motto.  He voted for it and put on his topboots to ride to Dublin from the Ards of Down to do so.

    Lal the ral the ra
    the rocky road to Dublin.

A gruff squire on horseback with shiny topboots.  Soft day, sir John!  Soft day, your honour! ...  Day! ...  Day! ...  Two topboots jog dangling on to Dublin.  Lal the ral the ra.  Lal the ral the raddy.

—­That reminds me, Mr Deasy said.  You can do me a favour, Mr Dedalus, with some of your literary friends.  I have a letter here for the press.  Sit down a moment.  I have just to copy the end.

He went to the desk near the window, pulled in his chair twice and read off some words from the sheet on the drum of his typewriter.

—­Sit down.  Excuse me, he said over his shoulder, the dictates of common sense.  Just a moment.

He peered from under his shaggy brows at the manuscript by his elbow and, muttering, began to prod the stiff buttons of the keyboard slowly, sometimes blowing as he screwed up the drum to erase an error.

Stephen seated himself noiselessly before the princely presence.  Framed around the walls images of vanished horses stood in homage, their meek heads poised in air:  lord Hastings’ Repulse, the duke of Westminster’s Shotover, the duke of Beaufort’s Ceylon, PRIX de paris, 1866.  Elfin riders sat them, watchful of a sign.  He saw their speeds, backing king’s colours, and shouted with the shouts of vanished crowds.

—­Full stop, Mr Deasy bade his keys.  But prompt ventilation of this allimportant question …

Where Cranly led me to get rich quick, hunting his winners among the mudsplashed brakes, amid the bawls of bookies on their pitches and reek of the canteen, over the motley slush.  Fair Rebel!  Fair Rebel!  Even money the favourite:  ten to one the field.  Dicers and thimbleriggers we hurried by after the hoofs, the vying caps and jackets and past the meatfaced woman, a butcher’s dame, nuzzling thirstily her clove of orange.

Shouts rang shrill from the boys’ playfield and a whirring whistle.

Again:  a goal.  I am among them, among their battling bodies in a medley, the joust of life.  You mean that knockkneed mother’s darling who seems to be slightly crawsick?  Jousts.  Time shocked rebounds, shock by shock.  Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of the slain, a shout of spearspikes baited with men’s bloodied guts.

—­Now then, Mr Deasy said, rising.

He came to the table, pinning together his sheets.  Stephen stood up.

—­I have put the matter into a nutshell, Mr Deasy said.  It’s about the foot and mouth disease.  Just look through it.  There can be no two opinions on the matter.

May I trespass on your valuable space.  That doctrine of LAISSEZ faire which so often in our history.  Our cattle trade.  The way of all our old industries.  Liverpool ring which jockeyed the Galway harbour scheme.  European conflagration.  Grain supplies through the narrow waters of the channel.  The pluterperfect imperturbability of the department of agriculture.  Pardoned a classical allusion.  Cassandra.  By a woman who was no better than she should be.  To come to the point at issue.

—­I don’t mince words, do I?  Mr Deasy asked as Stephen read on.

Foot and mouth disease.  Known as Koch’s preparation.  Serum and virus.  Percentage of salted horses.  Rinderpest.  Emperor’s horses at Murzsteg, lower Austria.  Veterinary surgeons.  Mr Henry Blackwood Price.  Courteous offer a fair trial.  Dictates of common sense.  Allimportant question.  In every sense of the word take the bull by the horns.  Thanking you for the hospitality of your columns.

—­I want that to be printed and read, Mr Deasy said.  You will see at the next outbreak they will put an embargo on Irish cattle.  And it can be cured.  It is cured.  My cousin, Blackwood Price, writes to me it is regularly treated and cured in Austria by cattledoctors there.  They offer to come over here.  I am trying to work up influence with the department.  Now I’m going to try publicity.  I am surrounded by difficulties, by … intrigues by … backstairs influence by …

He raised his forefinger and beat the air oldly before his voice spoke.

—­Mark my words, Mr Dedalus, he said.  England is in the hands of the jews.  In all the highest places:  her finance, her press.  And they are the signs of a nation’s decay.  Wherever they gather they eat up the nation’s vital strength.  I have seen it coming these years.  As sure as we are standing here the jew merchants are already at their work of destruction.  Old England is dying.

He stepped swiftly off, his eyes coming to blue life as they passed a broad sunbeam.  He faced about and back again.

—­Dying, he said again, if not dead by now.

    The harlot’s cry from street to street
    shall weave old England’s windingsheet.

His eyes open wide in vision stared sternly across the sunbeam in which he halted.

—­A merchant, Stephen said, is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or gentile, is he not?

—­They sinned against the light, Mr Deasy said gravely.  And you can see the darkness in their eyes.  And that is why they are wanderers on the earth to this day.

On the steps of the Paris stock exchange the goldskinned men quoting prices on their gemmed fingers.  Gabble of geese.  They swarmed loud, uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk hats.  Not theirs:  these clothes, this speech, these gestures.  Their full slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but knew the rancours massed about them and knew their zeal was vain.  Vain patience to heap and hoard.  Time surely would scatter all.  A hoard heaped by the roadside:  plundered and passing on.  Their eyes knew their years of wandering and, patient, knew the dishonours of their flesh.

—­Who has not?  Stephen said.

—­What do you mean?  Mr Deasy asked.

He came forward a pace and stood by the table.  His underjaw fell sideways open uncertainly.  Is this old wisdom?  He waits to hear from me.

—­History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

From the playfield the boys raised a shout.  A whirring whistle:  goal. 
What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?

—­The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said.  All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.

Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying: 

—­That is God.

Hooray!  Ay!  Whrrwhee!

—­What?  Mr Deasy asked.

—­A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.

Mr Deasy looked down and held for awhile the wings of his nose tweaked between his fingers.  Looking up again he set them free.

—­I am happier than you are, he said.  We have committed many errors and many sins.  A woman brought sin into the world.  For a woman who was no better than she should be, Helen, the runaway wife of Menelaus, ten years the Greeks made war on Troy.  A faithless wife first brought the strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough’s wife and her leman, O’Rourke, prince of Breffni.  A woman too brought Parnell low.  Many errors, many failures but not the one sin.  I am a struggler now at the end of my days.  But I will fight for the right till the end.

    For Ulster will fight
    and Ulster will be right.

Stephen raised the sheets in his hand.

—­Well, sir, he began …

—­I foresee, Mr Deasy said, that you will not remain here very long at this work.  You were not born to be a teacher, I think.  Perhaps I am wrong.

—­A learner rather, Stephen said.

And here what will you learn more?

Mr Deasy shook his head.

—­Who knows? he said.  To learn one must be humble.  But life is the great teacher.

Stephen rustled the sheets again.

—­As regards these, he began.

—­Yes, Mr Deasy said.  You have two copies there.  If you can have them published at once.

Telegraph.  Irish homestead.

—­I will try, Stephen said, and let you know tomorrow.  I know two editors slightly.

—­That will do, Mr Deasy said briskly.  I wrote last night to Mr Field, M.P.  There is a meeting of the cattletraders’ association today at the City Arms hotel.  I asked him to lay my letter before the meeting.  You see if you can get it into your two papers.  What are they?

—­The evening telegraph ...

—­That will do, Mr Deasy said.  There is no time to lose.  Now I have to answer that letter from my cousin.

—­Good morning, sir, Stephen said, putting the sheets in his pocket.  Thank you.

—­Not at all, Mr Deasy said as he searched the papers on his desk.  I like to break a lance with you, old as I am.

—­Good morning, sir, Stephen said again, bowing to his bent back.

He went out by the open porch and down the gravel path under the trees, hearing the cries of voices and crack of sticks from the playfield.  The lions couchant on the pillars as he passed out through the gate:  toothless terrors.  Still I will help him in his fight.  Mulligan will dub me a new name:  the bullockbefriending bard.

—­Mr Dedalus!

Running after me.  No more letters, I hope.

—­Just one moment.

—­Yes, sir, Stephen said, turning back at the gate.

Mr Deasy halted, breathing hard and swallowing his breath.

—­I just wanted to say, he said.  Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the jews.  Do you know that?  No.  And do you know why?

He frowned sternly on the bright air.

—­Why, sir?  Stephen asked, beginning to smile.

—­Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly.

A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a rattling chain of phlegm.  He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing, his lifted arms waving to the air.

—­She never let them in, he cried again through his laughter as he stamped on gaitered feet over the gravel of the path.  That’s why.

On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.

Ineluctable modality of the visible:  at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.  Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.  Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust:  coloured signs.  Limits of the diaphane.  But he adds:  in bodies.  Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured.  How?  By knocking his sconce against them, sure.  Go easy.  Bald he was and a millionaire, MAESTRO DI COLOR CHE SANNO.  Limit of the diaphane in.  Why in?  Diaphane, adiaphane.  If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door.  Shut your eyes and see.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells.  You are walking through it howsomever.  I am, a stride at a time.  A very short space of time through very short times of space.  Five, six:  the NACHEINANDER.  Exactly:  and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible.  Open your eyes.  No.  Jesus!  If I fell over a cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the NEBENEINANDER ineluctably!  I am getting on nicely in the dark.  My ash sword hangs at my side.  Tap with it:  they do.  My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, NEBENEINANDER.  Sounds solid:  made by the mallet of LOS DEMIURGOS.  Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand?  Crush, crack, crick, crick.  Wild sea money.  Dominie Deasy kens them a’.

    Won’t you come to Sandymount,
    MADELINE the mare?

Rhythm begins, you see.  I hear.  Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching.  No, agallop:  DELINE the mare.

Open your eyes now.  I will.  One moment.  Has all vanished since?  If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane.  BASTA!  I will see if I can see.

See now.  There all the time without you:  and ever shall be, world without end.

They came down the steps from Leahy’s terrace prudently, FRAUENZIMMER:  and down the shelving shore flabbily, their splayed feet sinking in the silted sand.  Like me, like Algy, coming down to our mighty mother.  Number one swung lourdily her midwife’s bag, the other’s gamp poked in the beach.  From the liberties, out for the day.  Mrs Florence MacCabe, relict of the late Patk MacCabe, deeply lamented, of Bride Street.  One of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life.  Creation from nothing.  What has she in the bag?  A misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed in ruddy wool.  The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh.  That is why mystic monks.  Will you be as gods?  Gaze in your omphalos.  Hello!  Kinch here.  Put me on to Edenville.  Aleph, alpha:  nought, nought, one.

Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon:  Heva, naked Eve.  She had no navel.  Gaze.  Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to everlasting.  Womb of sin.

Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten.  By them, the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath.  They clasped and sundered, did the coupler’s will.  From before the ages He willed me and now may not will me away or ever.  A LEX ETERNA stays about Him.  Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son are consubstantial?  Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions?  Warring his life long upon the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality.  Illstarred heresiarch’ In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last:  euthanasia.  With beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of a widowed see, with upstiffed omophorion, with clotted hinderparts.

Airs romped round him, nipping and eager airs.  They are coming, waves.  The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds of Mananaan.

I mustn’t forget his letter for the press.  And after?  The Ship, half twelve.  By the way go easy with that money like a good young imbecile.

Yes, I must.

His pace slackened.  Here.  Am I going to aunt Sara’s or not?  My consubstantial father’s voice.  Did you see anything of your artist brother Stephen lately?  No?  Sure he’s not down in Strasburg terrace with his aunt

Sally?  Couldn’t he fly a bit higher than that, eh?  And and and and tell us, Stephen, how is uncle Si?  O, weeping God, the things I married into!  De boys up in de hayloft.  The drunken little costdrawer and his brother, the cornet player.  Highly respectable gondoliers!  And skeweyed Walter sirring his father, no less!  Sir.  Yes, sir.  No, sir.  Jesus wept:  and no wonder, by Christ!

I pull the wheezy bell of their shuttered cottage:  and wait.  They take me for a dun, peer out from a coign of vantage.

—­It’s Stephen, sir.

—­Let him in.  Let Stephen in.

A bolt drawn back and Walter welcomes me.

—­We thought you were someone else.

In his broad bed nuncle Richie, pillowed and blanketed, extends over the hillock of his knees a sturdy forearm.  Cleanchested.  He has washed the upper moiety.

—­Morrow, nephew.

He lays aside the lapboard whereon he drafts his bills of costs for the eyes of master Goff and master Shapland Tandy, filing consents and common searches and a writ of DUCES TECUM.  A bogoak frame over his bald head:  Wilde’s REQUIESCAT.  The drone of his misleading whistle brings Walter back.

—­Yes, sir?

—­Malt for Richie and Stephen, tell mother.  Where is she?

—­Bathing Crissie, sir.

Papa’s little bedpal.  Lump of love.

—­No, uncle Richie …

—­Call me Richie.  Damn your lithia water.  It lowers.  Whusky!

—­Uncle Richie, really …

—­Sit down or by the law Harry I’ll knock you down.

Walter squints vainly for a chair.

—­He has nothing to sit down on, sir.

—­He has nowhere to put it, you mug.  Bring in our chippendale chair.  Would you like a bite of something?  None of your damned lawdeedaw airs here.  The rich of a rasher fried with a herring?  Sure?  So much the better.  We have nothing in the house but backache pills.

ALL’ERTA!

He drones bars of Ferrando’s ARIA DI SORTITA.  The grandest number,
Stephen, in the whole opera.  Listen.

His tuneful whistle sounds again, finely shaded, with rushes of the air, his fists bigdrumming on his padded knees.

This wind is sweeter.

Houses of decay, mine, his and all.  You told the Clongowes gentry you had an uncle a judge and an uncle a general in the army.  Come out of them, Stephen.  Beauty is not there.  Nor in the stagnant bay of Marsh’s library where you read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas.  For whom?  The hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close.  A hater of his kind ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the moon, his eyeballs stars.  Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled.  The oval equine faces, Temple, Buck Mulligan, Foxy Campbell, Lanternjaws.  Abbas father,—­ furious dean, what offence laid fire to their brains?  Paff!  DESCENDE, CALVE, ut ne AMPLIUS DECALVERIS.  A garland of grey hair on his comminated head see him me clambering down to the footpace (DESCENDE!), clutching a monstrance, basiliskeyed.  Get down, baldpoll!  A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the altar’s horns, the snorted Latin of jackpriests moving burly in their albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of kidneys of wheat.

And at the same instant perhaps a priest round the corner is elevating it.  Dringdring!  And two streets off another locking it into a pyx.  Dringadring!  And in a ladychapel another taking housel all to his own cheek.  Dringdring!  Down, up, forward, back.  Dan Occam thought of that, invincible doctor.  A misty English morning the imp hypostasis tickled his brain.  Bringing his host down and kneeling he heard twine with his second bell the first bell in the transept (he is lifting his) and, rising, heard (now I am lifting) their two bells (he is kneeling) twang in diphthong.

Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint.  Isle of saints.  You were awfully holy, weren’t you?  You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you might not have a red nose.  You prayed to the devil in Serpentine avenue that the fubsy widow in front might lift her clothes still more from the wet street.  O Si, CERTO!  Sell your soul for that, do, dyed rags pinned round a squaw.  More tell me, more still!!  On the top of the Howth tram alone crying to the rain:  Naked women!  Naked women!  What about that, eh?

What about what?  What else were they invented for?

Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh?  I was young.  You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause earnestly, striking face.  Hurray for the Goddamned idiot!  Hray!  No-one saw:  tell no-one.  Books you were going to write with letters for titles.  Have you read his F?  O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful.  O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria?  Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara.  Pico della Mirandola like.  Ay, very like a whale.  When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once …

The grainy sand had gone from under his feet.  His boots trod again a damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada.  Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smouldered in seafire under a midden of man’s ashes.  He coasted them, walking warily.  A porterbottle stood up, stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough.  A sentinel:  isle of dreadful thirst.  Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze of dark cunning nets; farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts.  Ringsend:  wigwams of brown steersmen and master mariners.  Human shells.

He halted.  I have passed the way to aunt Sara’s.  Am I not going there?  Seems not.  No-one about.  He turned northeast and crossed the firmer sand towards the Pigeonhouse.

—­QUI VOUS A MIS DANS cette FICHUE position?

—­C’est le pigeon, Joseph.

Patrice, home on furlough, lapped warm milk with me in the bar MacMahon.  Son of the wild goose, Kevin Egan of Paris.  My father’s a bird, he lapped the sweet LAIT CHAUD with pink young tongue, plump bunny’s face.  Lap, LAPIN.  He hopes to win in the GROS lots.  About the nature of women he read in Michelet.  But he must send me la vie de Jesus by M. Leo Taxil.  Lent it to his friend.

—­C’est TORDANT, VOUS SAVEZ.  MOI, JE SUIS SOCIALISTE. JE ne CROIS PAS en
L’EXISTENCE de DIEU.  FAUT PAS le dire A mon P-re.

—­IL CROIT?

—­MON PERE, OUI.

SCHLUSS.  He laps.

My Latin quarter hat.  God, we simply must dress the character.  I want puce gloves.  You were a student, weren’t you?  Of what in the other devil’s name?  Paysayenn.  P. C. N., you know:  PHYSIQUES, CHIMIQUES et NATURELLES.  Aha.  Eating your groatsworth of MOU en CIVET, fleshpots of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen.  Just say in the most natural tone:  when I was in Paris; BOUL’ MICH’, I used to.  Yes, used to carry punched tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder somewhere.  Justice.  On the night of the seventeenth of February 1904 the prisoner was seen by two witnesses.  Other fellow did it:  other me.  Hat, tie, overcoat, nose.  LUI, c’est MOI.  You seem to have enjoyed yourself.

Proudly walking.  Whom were you trying to walk like?  Forget:  a dispossessed.  With mother’s money order, eight shillings, the banging door of the post office slammed in your face by the usher.  Hunger toothache.  Encore DEUX minutes.  Look clock.  Must get.  FERME.  Hired dog!  Shoot him to bloody bits with a bang shotgun, bits man spattered walls all brass buttons.  Bits all khrrrrklak in place clack back.  Not hurt?  O, that’s all right.  Shake hands.  See what I meant, see?  O, that’s all right.  Shake a shake.  O, that’s all only all right.

You were going to do wonders, what?  Missionary to Europe after fiery Columbanus.  Fiacre and Scotus on their creepystools in heaven spilt from their pintpots, loudlatinlaughing:  EUGE!  EUGE!  Pretending to speak broken English as you dragged your valise, porter threepence, across the slimy pier at Newhaven.  Comment?  Rich booty you brought back; le TUTU, five tattered numbers of PANTALON BLANC et CULOTTE rouge; a blue French telegram, curiosity to show: 

—­Mother dying come home father.

The aunt thinks you killed your mother.  That’s why she won’t.

    Then here’s A health to Mulligan’s aunt
    and I’ll tell you the reason why. 
    She always kept things decent in
    the HANNIGAN FAMILEYE.

His feet marched in sudden proud rhythm over the sand furrows, along by the boulders of the south wall.  He stared at them proudly, piled stone mammoth skulls.  Gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders.  The sun is there, the slender trees, the lemon houses.

Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets.  Moist pith of farls of bread, the froggreen wormwood, her matin incense, court the air.  Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife’s lover’s wife, the kerchiefed housewife is astir, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand.  In Rodot’s Yvonne and Madeleine newmake their tumbled beauties, shattering with gold teeth CHAUSSONS of pastry, their mouths yellowed with the PUS of FLAN BRETON.  Faces of Paris men go by, their wellpleased pleasers, curled conquistadores.

Noon slumbers.  Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers smeared with printer’s ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his white.  About us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets.  UN DEMI SETIER!  A jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron.  She serves me at his beck.  IL EST IRLANDAIS.  HOLLANDAIS?  NON FROMAGE.  DEUX IRLANDAIS, NOUS, IRLANDE, VOUS SAVEZ ah, OUI!  She thought you wanted a cheese HOLLANDAIS.  Your postprandial, do you know that word?  Postprandial.  There was a fellow I knew once in Barcelona, queer fellow, used to call it his postprandial.  Well:  SLAINTE!  Around the slabbed tables the tangle of wined breaths and grumbling gorges.  His breath hangs over our saucestained plates, the green fairy’s fang thrusting between his lips.  Of Ireland, the Dalcassians, of hopes, conspiracies, of Arthur Griffith now, A E, pimander, good shepherd of men.  To yoke me as his yokefellow, our crimes our common cause.  You’re your father’s son.  I know the voice.  His fustian shirt, sanguineflowered, trembles its Spanish tassels at his secrets.  M. Drumont, famous journalist, Drumont, know what he called queen Victoria?  Old hag with the yellow teeth.  VIEILLE OGRESSE with the DENTS JAUNES.  Maud Gonne, beautiful woman, la PATRIE, M. Millevoye, Felix Faure, know how he died?  Licentious men.  The froeken, BONNE A tout faire, who rubs male nakedness in the bath at Upsala.  MOI faire, she said, TOUS LES MESSIEURS.  Not this Monsieur, I said.  Most licentious custom.  Bath a most private thing.  I wouldn’t let my brother, not even my own brother, most lascivious thing.  Green eyes, I see you.  Fang, I feel.  Lascivious people.

The blue fuse burns deadly between hands and burns clear.  Loose tobaccoshreds catch fire:  a flame and acrid smoke light our corner.  Raw facebones under his peep of day boy’s hat.  How the head centre got away, authentic version.  Got up as a young bride, man, veil, orangeblossoms, drove out the road to Malahide.  Did, faith.  Of lost leaders, the betrayed, wild escapes.  Disguises, clutched at, gone, not here.

Spurned lover.  I was a strapping young gossoon at that time, I tell you.  I’ll show you my likeness one day.  I was, faith.  Lover, for her love he prowled with colonel Richard Burke, tanist of his sept, under the walls of Clerkenwell and, crouching, saw a flame of vengeance hurl them upward in the fog.  Shattered glass and toppling masonry.  In gay Paree he hides, Egan of Paris, unsought by any save by me.  Making his day’s stations, the dingy printingcase, his three taverns, the Montmartre lair he sleeps short night in, rue de la Goutte-d’Or, damascened with flyblown faces of the gone.  Loveless, landless, wifeless.  She is quite nicey comfy without her outcast man, madame in rue Git-le-Coeur, canary and two buck lodgers.  Peachy cheeks, a zebra skirt, frisky as a young thing’s.  Spurned and undespairing.  Tell Pat you saw me, won’t you?  I wanted to get poor Pat a job one time.  MON FILS, soldier of France.  I taught him to sing the boys of Kilkenny are stout roaring blades.  Know that old lay?  I taught Patrice that.  Old Kilkenny:  saint Canice, Strongbow’s castle on the Nore.  Goes like this.  O, O. He takes me, Napper Tandy, by the hand.

    O, O the boys of
    Kilkenny ...

Weak wasting hand on mine.  They have forgotten Kevin Egan, not he them.  Remembering thee, O Sion.

He had come nearer the edge of the sea and wet sand slapped his boots.  The new air greeted him, harping in wild nerves, wind of wild air of seeds of brightness.  Here, I am not walking out to the Kish lightship, am I?  He stood suddenly, his feet beginning to sink slowly in the quaking soil.  Turn back.

Turning, he scanned the shore south, his feet sinking again slowly in new sockets.  The cold domed room of the tower waits.  Through the barbacans the shafts of light are moving ever, slowly ever as my feet are sinking, creeping duskward over the dial floor.  Blue dusk, nightfall, deep blue night.  In the darkness of the dome they wait, their pushedback chairs, my obelisk valise, around a board of abandoned platters.  Who to clear it?  He has the key.  I will not sleep there when this night comes.  A shut door of a silent tower, entombing their—­blind bodies, the panthersahib and his pointer.  Call:  no answer.  He lifted his feet up from the suck and turned back by the mole of boulders.  Take all, keep all.  My soul walks with me, form of forms.  So in the moon’s midwatches I pace the path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing Elsinore’s tempting flood.

The flood is following me.  I can watch it flow past from here.  Get back then by the Poolbeg road to the strand there.  He climbed over the sedge and eely oarweeds and sat on a stool of rock, resting his ashplant in a grike.

A bloated carcass of a dog lay lolled on bladderwrack.  Before him the gunwale of a boat, sunk in sand.  UN COCHE ENSABLE Louis Veuillot called Gautier’s prose.  These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here.  And these, the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren of weasel rats.  Hide gold there.  Try it.  You have some.  Sands and stones.  Heavy of the past.  Sir Lout’s toys.  Mind you don’t get one bang on the ear.  I’m the bloody well gigant rolls all them bloody well boulders, bones for my steppingstones.  Feefawfum.  I zmellz de bloodz odz an Iridzman.

A point, live dog, grew into sight running across the sweep of sand.  Lord, is he going to attack me?  Respect his liberty.  You will not be master of others or their slave.  I have my stick.  Sit tight.  From farther away, walking shoreward across from the crested tide, figures, two.  The two maries.  They have tucked it safe mong the bulrushes.  Peekaboo.  I see you.  No, the dog.  He is running back to them.  Who?

Galleys of the Lochlanns ran here to beach, in quest of prey, their bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf.  Dane vikings, torcs of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the collar of gold.  A school of turlehide whales stranded in hot noon, spouting, hobbling in the shallows.  Then from the starving cagework city a horde of jerkined dwarfs, my people, with flayers’ knives, running, scaling, hacking in green blubbery whalemeat.  Famine, plague and slaughters.  Their blood is in me, their lusts my waves.  I moved among them on the frozen Liffey, that I, a changeling, among the spluttering resin fires.  I spoke to no-one:  none to me.

The dog’s bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back.  Dog of my enemy.  I just simply stood pale, silent, bayed about.  TERRIBILIA MEDITANS.  A primrose doublet, fortune’s knave, smiled on my fear.  For that are you pining, the bark of their applause?  Pretenders:  live their lives.  The Bruce’s brother, Thomas Fitzgerald, silken knight, Perkin Warbeck, York’s false scion, in breeches of silk of whiterose ivory, wonder of a day, and Lambert Simnel, with a tail of nans and sutlers, a scullion crowned.  All kings’ sons.  Paradise of pretenders then and now.  He saved men from drowning and you shake at a cur’s yelping.  But the courtiers who mocked Guido in Or san Michele were in their own house.  House of …  We don’t want any of your medieval abstrusiosities.  Would you do what he did?  A boat would be near, a lifebuoy.  NATURLICH, put there for you.  Would you or would you not?  The man that was drowned nine days ago off Maiden’s rock.  They are waiting for him now.  The truth, spit it out.  I would want to.  I would try.  I am not a strong swimmer.  Water cold soft.  When I put my face into it in the basin at Clongowes.  Can’t see!  Who’s behind me?  Out quickly, quickly!  Do you see the tide flowing quickly in on all sides, sheeting the lows of sand quickly, shellcocoacoloured?  If I had land under my feet.  I want his life still to be his, mine to be mine.  A drowning man.  His human eyes scream to me out of horror of his death.  I …  With him together down …  I could not save her.  Waters:  bitter death:  lost.

A woman and a man.  I see her skirties.  Pinned up, I bet.

Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides.  Looking for something lost in a past life.  Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a lowskimming gull.  The man’s shrieked whistle struck his limp ears.  He turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks.  On a field tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired.  At the lacefringe of the tide he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears.  His snout lifted barked at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse.  They serpented towards his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth, breaking, plashing, from far, from farther out, waves and waves.

Cocklepickers.  They waded a little way in the water and, stooping, soused their bags and, lifting them again, waded out.  The dog yelped running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again reared up at them with mute bearish fawning.  Unheeded he kept by them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf’s tongue redpanting from his jaws.  His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a calf’s gallop.  The carcass lay on his path.  He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffling rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog’s bedraggled fell.  Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal.  Ah, poor dogsbody!  Here lies poor dogsbody’s body.

—­Tatters!  Out of that, you mongrel!

The cry brought him skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight.  He slunk back in a curve.  Doesn’t see me.  Along by the edge of the mole he lolloped, dawdled, smelt a rock. and from under a cocked hindleg pissed against it.  He trotted forward and, lifting again his hindleg, pissed quick short at an unsmelt rock.  The simple pleasures of the poor.  His hindpaws then scattered the sand:  then his forepaws dabbled and delved.  Something he buried there, his grandmother.  He rooted in the sand, dabbling, delving and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand again with a fury of his claws, soon ceasing, a pard, a panther, got in spousebreach, vulturing the dead.

After he woke me last night same dream or was it?  Wait.  Open hallway.  Street of harlots.  Remember.  Haroun al Raschid.  I am almosting it.  That man led me, spoke.  I was not afraid.  The melon he had he held against my face.  Smiled:  creamfruit smell.  That was the rule, said.  In.  Come.  Red carpet spread.  You will see who.

Shouldering their bags they trudged, the red Egyptians.  His blued feet out of turnedup trousers slapped the clammy sand, a dull brick muffler strangling his unshaven neck.  With woman steps she followed:  the ruffian and his strolling mort.  Spoils slung at her back.  Loose sand and shellgrit crusted her bare feet.  About her windraw face hair trailed.  Behind her lord, his helpmate, bing awast to Romeville.  When night hides her body’s flaws calling under her brown shawl from an archway where dogs have mired.  Her fancyman is treating two Royal Dublins in O’Loughlin’s of Blackpitts.  Buss her, wap in rogues’ rum lingo, for, O, my dimber wapping dell!  A shefiend’s whiteness under her rancid rags.  Fumbally’s lane that night:  the tanyard smells.

    White thy fambles, red thy gan
    and thy quarrons dainty is. 
    COUCH A HOGSHEAD with me then. 
    In the DARKMANS clip and kiss.

Morose delectation Aquinas tunbelly calls this, FRATE PORCOSPINO.  Unfallen Adam rode and not rutted.  Call away let him:  Thy quarrons dainty is.  Language no whit worse than his.  Monkwords, marybeads jabber on their girdles:  roguewords, tough nuggets patter in their pockets.

Passing now.

A side eye at my Hamlet hat.  If I were suddenly naked here as I sit?  I am not.  Across the sands of all the world, followed by the sun’s flaming sword, to the west, trekking to evening lands.  She trudges, schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load.  A tide westering, moondrawn, in her wake.  Tides, myriadislanded, within her, blood not mine, OINOPA PONTON, a winedark sea.  Behold the handmaid of the moon.  In sleep the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise.  Bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled.  OMNIS CARO ad te VENIET.  He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth’s kiss.

Here.  Put a pin in that chap, will you?  My tablets.  Mouth to her kiss.

No.  Must be two of em.  Glue em well.  Mouth to her mouth’s kiss.

His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air:  mouth to her moomb.  Oomb, allwombing tomb.  His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched:  ooeeehah:  roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring wayawayawayawayaway.  Paper.  The banknotes, blast them.  Old Deasy’s letter.  Here.  Thanking you for the hospitality tear the blank end off.  Turning his back to the sun he bent over far to a table of rock and scribbled words.  That’s twice I forgot to take slips from the library counter.

His shadow lay over the rocks as he bent, ending.  Why not endless till the farthest star?  Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds.  Me sits there with his augur’s rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars.  I throw this ended shadow from me, manshape ineluctable, call it back.  Endless, would it be mine, form of my form?  Who watches me here?  Who ever anywhere will read these written words?  Signs on a white field.  Somewhere to someone in your flutiest voice.  The good bishop of Cloyne took the veil of the temple out of his shovel hat:  veil of space with coloured emblems hatched on its field.  Hold hard.  Coloured on a flat:  yes, that’s right.  Flat I see, then think distance, near, far, flat I see, east, back.  Ah, see now!  Falls back suddenly, frozen in stereoscope.  Click does the trick.  You find my words dark.  Darkness is in our souls do you not think?  Flutier.  Our souls, shamewounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more.

She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes.  Now where the blue hell am I bringing her beyond the veil?  Into the ineluctable modality of the ineluctable visuality.  She, she, she.  What she?  The virgin at Hodges Figgis’ window on Monday looking in for one of the alphabet books you were going to write.  Keen glance you gave her.  Wrist through the braided jesse of her sunshade.  She lives in Leeson park with a grief and kickshaws, a lady of letters.  Talk that to someone else, Stevie:  a pickmeup.  Bet she wears those curse of God stays suspenders and yellow stockings, darned with lumpy wool.  Talk about apple dumplings, PIUTTOSTO.  Where are your wits?

Touch me.  Soft eyes.  Soft soft soft hand.  I am lonely here.  O, touch me soon, now.  What is that word known to all men?  I am quiet here alone.  Sad too.  Touch, touch me.

He lay back at full stretch over the sharp rocks, cramming the scribbled note and pencil into a pock his hat.  His hat down on his eyes.  That is Kevin Egan’s movement I made, nodding for his nap, sabbath sleep.  ET VIDIT DEUS.  ET ERANT VALDE BONA.  Alo!  BONJOUR.  Welcome as the flowers in May.  Under its leaf he watched through peacocktwittering lashes the southing sun.  I am caught in this burning scene.  Pan’s hour, the faunal noon.  Among gumheavy serpentplants, milkoozing fruits, where on the tawny waters leaves lie wide.  Pain is far.

And no more turn aside and brood.

His gaze brooded on his broadtoed boots, a buck’s castoffs, NEBENEINANDER.  He counted the creases of rucked leather wherein another’s foot had nested warm.  The foot that beat the ground in tripudium, foot I dislove.  But you were delighted when Esther Osvalt’s shoe went on you:  girl I knew in Paris.  TIENS, QUEL PETIT PIED!  Staunch friend, a brother soul:  Wilde’s love that dare