Dublin 2

July 27, 2017

Up early to a vat of cappuccino and then to the National Gallery. It’s been long enough since my last museum jaunt that I gobbled this one up, especially old favorites that I have seen time after time, and missed in the interval. Thirty seven years ago I saw a fantastic painting of Mary Magdalene ascending to heaven gowned in her own hair. No one knew what I was talking about. Even the museum, when I asked, didn’t know what I meant, but there it was, The Assumption of Mary Magdalene by Silvestro dei Gheraducci. So many circles are closing, Liam in Sligo, the Clarence, the Assumption of Mary in the NGI.

Intermittent, quite ferocious, rain, me seeking out Loretto Maegher, who has moved and renamed her gallery again. Now it is the Trinity. I stopped by and bought a painting, which I will not describe so it’s a surprise again when it arrives in the mail in a week or so. Both she and her sister look great.

J went to Derry and apparently found a raft of relatives sitting ‘round the ancestral graves.

Dublin was to me so much the City of Sex that now that it isn’t, I don’t know what to do with my evenings. Theater, yes, but what then? The idea of dragging myself across Dame Street to the George is almost unendurable. The Dock, the Sauna of the Mysteries, is gone. There are others, and I was a hit there late into my 50's, but– it’s best for imagining now. There are dangers such as Gary the Bad Actor last night, almost certainly a pickpocket, and perhaps not as harmless as the other two to whom I fell victim through the years. Do I even want it? Only in the metaphysical sense– by which I may mean, only from an angel.

In the Norseman in Temple Bar

I will sit in the pub window until twelve beautiful men pass by.
I will measure the consumption of my pint to make this happen–
neither too fast, so the beer gives out before the beauty,
nor too slow, as to leave the intoxicants unbalanced,
the lesser enduring.
Conquer, soul says to heart, the inclination to lament.
all those who passed when nobody was watching.
This task is not suggested in the tourist books.
There is a reason. You were warned. I whisper “beware.”
Yet, one for the curl of his dark brown hair.
One for the flash of his grass-green eye.
Another for his song as he passes by.
One for the strut of a tall red stag.
One for his cock raised like a flag
(Is it the seams of his trousers at play?
a merry memory from yesterday?)
One for his sorrow, one for his mirth.
One who is, for what it’s worth,
so like me once upon a time.
I make it all go neatly in a rhyme,
except for the fragment of my heart
that gull-like haunts the Liffey water, all apart,
with his lone cry to the living and the dead,
and this summer night will not be comforted.

Mandy Patinkin is announced for The Great Comet. That show will play forever.

Saw The Water Orchard at Project Arts, as if Joe Orton and Samuel Beckett, each at the age of fifteen, had crossed swords with Chekov. Witty, enjoyable, the one farce I’ve seen from which I could come away satisfied. It’s still pointless– an absurd problem invented and then solved absurdly-- but an effervescent night of theater. Would it work with actors less dazzlingly accomplished? One last drink at the Garage Bar, which I kind of love.