Amy Sailer / Reactions after visiting the James Joyce Centre

Reactions after visiting the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, 2010

Amy Sailer

yes I said yes I will Yes.

Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921 –James Joyce, Ulysses

i. Tourists, we lust after fluency, grow an inch each time someone asks us for directions…

ii. I reject shamrock, Celtic Cross, man in a plush emerald suit before the National Museum of Leprechauns, Warehouse (but not the Guinness), Blarney Stone and all the eloquence of the world— In the name of brick, driving up coast past yawls slicing along the sea to Cromwell’s severed head catacombed in Drogheda, brogue cloptrop, and a pint that I promise is my last.

iii. In his December 16th letter to Nora, Joyce wrote Fuck me in your dressing gown with nothing on under it, opening it suddenly and showing me your belly and thighs and back and pulling me on top of you on the kitchen table.

This jumble of rickets greying in the installation must be said table.

iv. Leaning over the Liffey— men in suits aerodynamic on bicycles, walking the crosswalks, from the window grime of a Luas or bus, barges close as a mile out, the smog, a little lilt to their smog as planes pass by overhead

v. My brogues keep time in iambs, rhythm particular to cobblestone, to Luas track— a rhythm thoughts to traipse along

vi. Coming out of a vegetarian café one afternoon, she stepped into a storm of commuters waiting to board the homebound Luas. The confusion was so great that her stomach and legs came unattached from her torso, and so there was barely pain when a stiletto thrust into the medial bone of her foot. The skin around bloomed dark and violet, of course, but it was only in the airport when she took off her shoes during the long layover that she felt an extraneous nub and realized the bone had been broken, so that from then on something would grate in a new dissonance, like a piano left so long off-key that it comes to sound, almost, right.

vii. clop trop clop trop clop tropclop tropclop tropclop trop

viii. seven years’ odyssey an enormous sentence ending Yes. at home

ix. Left on Rathmines. Turn onto Harcourt. Continue. Continue past St. Stephen’s Green, past Grafton, across the Liffey, onto O’Connell through Trinity there, Post Office, Liberty’s breast punctured with bullet holes, gunsheen stone, ruddy, baked, crumble Georgian brick.

x. In the morning coming through and going home in the afternoon— it’s the way of footsteps, of froth bottoming the glass.