So we’d have a coffee, maybe two, then off
into town by the side streets, looking for
red-brick houses with lilac doors and yellow
window frames. Drop into the IFI, sit over
another coffee, browsing the catalogue with half interest,
the steady drift of film-goers and idlers with more.
On down Dame Street to College Green,
enjoying our navigation of ever-shifting crowds,
the dexterous manoeuvrability of ourselves.
In Hodges Figgis we’d scan the poetry
shelves and the art books, those names and titles
settling in our heads like we were travelling the
world: Heaney, Mahon, Carver, Balthus,
Kahlo, Lorca, Basho, Holub ‒ dabs of fresh paint
and print to keep us informed for a month or two ‒
before returning to Grafton Street to knit crooked stitches
through the crowds, stop a few minutes to hear a busker
play a saw or slide guitar then around to Tower Records
to be tempted by some new ECM arrival in the jazz section.
George’s, Aungier, Wexford, Camden, Richmond Streets;
the diminishing scale of a city’s architecture, and
the backwards walk down the telescope to the landscape
of our normal lives. Crossing the border at the canal, with
its familiar vista down Rathmines Road to the mountains
beyond; we, like fish, breathing easier in our own habitat,
saw our hurdles flattened, but, perhaps, never recognized
the days of our lives?
That beautiful odyssey: Saturdays, mid-morning to mid-afternoon;
or maybe it was just one Saturday,
or, maybe, it wasn’t at all.
