TESTIMONY

TESTIMONY

TESTIMONY

You guided me through Dublin and Derrida
and I went along with you though you told me
that one could not be “wrong” or “right”,
that these were “words”. You stressed
there was no such thing as the canonical text,
nor even the next best thing. You drew me
into Bewley’s Oriental Café standing cloned
in its own postmodern pastiche
and Grafton Street. There, over sticky buns
interpolated with glacé cherries that pressed red imprints
into the buns’ white substance, you somehow de-conjured up
the self-styled “writer”
of the Codex Ulysseus
so that when he put in a radical failure of appearance
you were able to sever any connection
between author and oeuvre,
“What is it, after all, that is authorized?”,
you said, and gave an allusive nod,
with your feathered black fringe and Irish-blue eyes,
to Althusser whilst continuing to assert
recondite doctrines through unpursed lips
pinkened with cerise so that I tumbled
head-long into ideological concurrence with you:
I knew what you were talking about and I didn't care.

From there we pursued a line of argument
along the General Post Office where I read the proclamation
In the Name of God and the Dead Generations
leaded into the brass plaque beneath Cuchulainn
and I inserted an interpretative finger into bullet holes
typed there on the wall in belt-fed lines;
the beautiful stone, the terrible queerness
of just standing there with the paths the bullets had taken
passing right through me. So we were pleased
to walk the free streets and follow
our merely quodlibetical ratiocinations
in the sight of dead heroes and live tin-whistlers.


But, when we crossed the singular Trinity quad
and perused the Book of Kells
etched forever on the stretched skin of unknown dead sheep,
I felt a revision begin.
There were its principal letters lit up
like O’Connell Street on Paddy’s Day night,
knocking seven bells out of itself,
fiddling and chanting and beating the bodhran
to the infinite glory of God
and the resurrection, with its parchment
grey from multifarious eyes draining the light from it
in rays, surveying its apostolic dogmas inscribed there
by quills snug against ink-stained finger calluses,
the nibs screeching like peewits
against the manuscript’s interface, relentless,
taking pains and decades
to give the work the full weight of God’s law.

So it was that I saw two sides of an antinomy take hold
and go to undo me like a zip
and I saw that it was writ
that we should be the critics of our own juxtaposition,
to deconstruct what there was between us
and discover if it was all just so much periphrasis
or something more.

Therefore when we found ourselves
beneath the spiral staircase
at the hub of the circular bookshop, in Tomes St  
I think it might have been,
with the steeped banks of shelves in aisles that receded
on all points of the compass like the world itself, I delved
into the shelf labelled Poetry / Irish / in English,
came up with The Collected of yer man,
unread and silent straight from his tongue,
which I held out to you and you took hold of
so it spanned our two hands like an arc of electric
that cracked and spat between us,
both wanting to let go, each unable to.