On my first visit to Ireland, many years ago, I asked someone on my travels in the South and West if he would recommend a really good bar in Dublin (the city has a bewilderingly huge selection of them, but many of them are rather generic, soulless). And he said: Mulligan's - on Poolbeg Street, just behind TCD, around the corner from the Irish Times offices. It might have been a bum steer, a random recollection, a flawed recommendation - but it wasn't! I have since passed on the same advice a number of times to friends. And I make a point of always trying to nip back there for a quick visit whenever I am passing through (which, alas, has been only a very few times since).
It has a cosy intimacy - a small space divided up into lots of little nooks and corners by wooden partitions and booths. It has genuine, unreconstructed Victorian-era decor - dark wood, frosted windows, tiled floors. It has an interesting, garrulous, disreputable gaggle of regulars - many of them skiving journalists from the Times, one suspects. There always seems to be The Prettiest Girl In Ireland behind the bar or waiting on the tables. And the Guinness is perfection (it probably helps that they are only minutes away from the brewery; but they also do a very slow pour...).
Unfortunately, the place is now inextricably tied up in my mind with a Lost Love - a one-night stand (I don't do those!) that should have been something much more, but went disastrously wrong; though at least I have the recollection of one gorgeously romantic weekend spent with perhaps the most beautiful girl I have ever known.
Last Sunday
I have a camera in my head
Which keeps the snapshots
Of a strange weekend.
You, jogging across the street
To fetch the milk and papers,
Bowing your head into the gale.
And Kavanagh on his bench,
Haloed by the dazzle of the canal,
Waiting resignedly for the next poem
As if for a bus.
The sudden kiss
On Stephen's Green,
And passing strangers smiling
At the tenderness of it.
But most of all, a corner table in Mulligan's:
A glimpse of the blue morning behind,
As spring sunshine teemed through the frosted window
Finding strands of gold and copper in your hair;
And the light reflected back from the newspaper,
An amber glow, showing your face
More beautiful than I had ever seen.
But your thoughts, your troubled thoughts
Hung heavy about your head,
Visible as blue billows of cigarette smoke
Swirling in the slanted sunshafts....
While I sipped my Guinness slowly
To extend these moments,
This ecstasy of happy-sadness.
2 comments:
a few notable items:
1. don't do one night stands --- piques the curiousity - why? what's happend? always? or only after a particular experience? (not to say I believe in them either - but to state you don't do them, does bring the issue attention.)
2. "disastrously" wrong? --- wow, what happend?
3. bowing your head into the gale - takes my thoughts back to the swan, head apologetically drooping - but no apparent apologies here - though, beyond the obvious need to fight the gale, her movements pay respect to the forces of nature (that's the nature lover in me seeing what I want to see in a poem :) ) - or it is another reflection of the troubled thoughts that hang heavy over her head (more probably your intention) - I can imagagine drawing some more symbolism, were there more to read about "the most beautiful girl [you] have ever known" - any other poems?
4. you've already commented elsewhere on the "resignedly" waiting Kavanaugh - I'll ditto that.
5. "gold and copper"; "amber glow" - these are lovely colors - lovely images.
6. sipping your Guinnes "slowly" - ah yes, making an after dinner cup of tea last an hour (while all the other dinner party guests have slowly slipped home to their beds, ready for the worries of the next day), slowly picking at lunch at Xiao Wang Fu until you're the only two left in the restaurant (all the rest have had their power lunch and are back at their desks, making power deals), choosing the longer route to walk home (even when your feet hurt and you think you might be catching a cold) -- not wanting the moment to end -- this is classic
Now you're being cheeky.
And nosey.
I am in principle against the idea of one-night stands because.... well, probably because sex is less important to me than relationships. I think you do, inevitably, become connected to someone you sleep with, even once; and it's unwise, self-deluding, potentially damaging to treat those contacts as unimportant, disposable.
It's not based on a bad experience. It's always been my position of principle.
I have, of course, occasionally (not often!) strayed from that moral high ground.... although I like to think that it was always (no, it wasn't - but most of the time) because I had more serious interest and it happened not to work out, rather than because either or both of us were going into it as a tear-off-and-throw-away deal.
That particular one in Dublin? I said it was "disastrous". You don't ask about disasters. It was ugly. People got hurt. The trauma lingers years later. We had some lovely moments together, but it wasn't meant to be.
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