By Tim MacGabhann

 The Dead by James Joyce (in Dubliners, London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2000) 1: pp.188-90, 197, 202: in the style of John Ashbery

The draught then a pocket of cool in salon heat: remembrance in motion,
You’d like to say to her, and talk of how whisper, draft, memory are of one temperature – ‘But under another name: a very selective bravery, yours, no?’
A frown wants to lock two hooks between your eyes, can’t,
And so sharpens in the head as a taste for humid Honduran blood-jungle
When every notated moment was political, but likewise none was political.

In lieu of shuttling in ‘L’s which won’t resolve into liquid,
Tell her ‘Have you ever – ?’ instead how you have seen the city, Looked upon gibbous headlights’ mirrored spider eyes
‘albeit from a balcony. All heltering syrupy lingerings: And fine, honestly, if you can hand le a pageant of ants.’

How you sifted printouts for data that might prick and sting,
How the mereness of word-count was parameter, buffer:
‘Well, yes, also a balcony-rail mapped al l over with petrol-fumes. Though confining: you couldn’t know how you knew anything,

If knowing even meant anything – not in a town where no-one talks.’

Unclasping, pinch up raisin and almond and figs from their cones,
Be either stunned or engrossed in how demarara turns fingertips’ whorls drab, abraded, As when thumbing in pine boxes another’s seamed loved pages
Under Saturday’s bloody neon thud some evening whose promise won’t ignite.
‘But we had been invited to the catastrophe.’ ‘Well, naturally.’

Such a kink in the evening might be unknotted
From around the exemplariness or otherwise of what befell us, Or as the wish for someone some evening
To sift these figments for which the word thoughts is too grand, And reckon how much stock to set by which.

Instead of an answer, perhaps smoke webs thick as cotton gauze
Where we might watch a thought spider and ladder
Hooking and unhooking eight unbreaking ink-blot knees, all finical Upwards away from when she just now breathed ‘Hack’ at your nape
As a reminder that this draught, too, goes heating and tapering into nowhere.