Photo courtesy Irish Times, 2023.
The
Spire [i]
1.
Dramatic vista
like a lightening conductor
Big Jim on O’Connell
is finally charged!
or
like some Indian rope trick
going up through the Platonic roof
piercing the heavens
from which descend
like a whole bunch of Jacks
the most welcome army of immigrants…
2
Hegelian figures,
impossible unities;
John de Bapiste
a la Leonardo- finger in the air-
hermaphroditic creature in furs
all ravisher, ravishing and ravished
contrasting strongly with Larkin’s imploring relish.
Spire rents the air
the curtain of the divisible invisibly real
Mathew again with apollonian constraint
embraced by Jesu
a latter day saint
3.
A being in torment
has no repository
no exact place to call their own local;
such is Hell
The Spire rents the horizon
revealing the fissures of reality
and there is Daniel
standing before you
Hegelian
All around him
errant figures are being harried
or are themselves giving chase
further on in College Green
Goldsmith reads and Burke
observes
while the genesis of the world coolly unfurls
4.
In the trajectory of the Spire
in the trajectory of the absolute annihilatory centre
the place of total demarcation
the grid and market awash with living potential
capacity to err
or implode
under the pressure
of the complete totality of presence
of the invisible structure
This then is the way this then is the place
In the trajectory of the Spire
in the trajectory of the absolute annihilatory centre
Absolute zero on the grid
our origins as distant or as closely confused
as those of all possible dreams of future
We thread beneath the Spire
close to the approximate holocaust
The General Post Office evokes the Acropolis
just as surely as the primeval forest
and so we are still with the fallen man
Icarus, Eurydice, Orpheus and all of the company of the damned
Here the pillars become transformed first from pronouns
into barley stalks, to papyrus reeds then trees
the concrete which
surrounds us is but the petrified leaves
on which we all inscribe daily our frail prints
whether we be obscure Hollywood starlets, or Neolithic-
hunter gatherers we crush like fruit pips smeared against the slate
this our so expendable tribal heritage
infinity stalks us its prey
extinction chastises us like a dog with a stick
abhorrent system of hierarchies by which we live
their funerary, a priori aspect
exclusivity bred like spores erects prejudice
on a phenomenological dimension
language too makes fools of us
somehow through the prism of five nouns
our horizon is sketched
it is monstrous
One must develop cerebral dynamism
cruise through other tongues to find other otherness
perspective, before returning, yet again
to the familiar
strange forest of domesticity
here mysterious wood nymphs
become further transformed
into oddly proportioned receptionists
paid to make invoices out to auditors and gynaecologists
Pan into the images produced by ultra-sound
absolute morphology
explore the further genesis of even more obscure stars
witness the true advent of the dead
This poem was written possibly twenty years ago...
[i] [i] The Spire is a pin-like monument made of stainless steel reaching 120
meters and which stands directly opposite the GPO ( General Post Office) the
symbolic heartland of the 1916 Rising. The Spire was hugely controversial at
the period of its construction ( 2002-2003), due to the canonical history of
the area – Nelson’s Pillar used to stand in this spot until it was blown up by
the IRA in the nineteen sixties.
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