Landscape and Memory I

Associations of Sunday - Dublin with my brother on an empty morning - breakfast in the huge empty dining hall of the Clarence Hotel, being waited on by about five smiling staff - bags packed and dumped and off through the city still smelling of sunlight and vomit and seagulls to the railway station at ? Tara Street - the half-empty train to Blackrock, tired homegoing partygoers half sleep or looking out of the window swinging dancing pumps from tired stockinged feet - alone at Blackrock station, the hour still too early, a mist hanging over the sea and nowhere open - a town of grey stone, sea-washed, strangely hardened - the market unpeeling itself, opening bleary shutters, brewing coffee - I found a flyleaf autographed by Brendan Kenneally from his poems 'Shelley in Dublin', my favourite souvenir - and then away again to the city waking and slightly noisier, recovering the bags and then the walk and an empty bus to the airport, stretching our feet across the seats as the bus lurched through north Dublin, dreaming of Guinness and tomorrows and my forthcoming wedding....