On
Grafton Street
In the pocket of the old black coat, The Winding Stair
I bought for three-and-six in Waterford,
that autumn, 1934.
Two days before, the invitation from Mrs Yeats
eased my trunk-call nerves, and brought me
on the Dublin train, and from there on foot, crossing
the bridge of mossy stone
towards Riversdale
and the poet’s house, set back in apple orchards.
She opened the door, her green dress neat
as a mown lawn: ‘You’re in beautiful time for tea,’ she
smiled,
and showed me through the narrow hall
to the study − a long, fire-lit room
of book shelves, cosy chairs, and landscapes
framed on lemon walls.
Mrs Yeats, fussing over powdered scones,
introduced me as Our Young Correspondent,
adding (I wilt even now, recalling it),
‘He’s a poet, too.’
Yeats stood up, in his porridge suit
and butterfly tie, a soft white plume of hair
falling across his brow. Aware suddenly
that he towered over me, and as though he considered it
poor manners in a host, gestured that I sit beside him,
near the table strewn with note paper
and open books.
We spoke of lost causes, of Maud Gonne,
walking the streets of Dublin
in widow’s black, gaunt with the memory of ’16.
From the book I took the folded sheet of my quatrains,
and when he’d read them, he looked out
a time across the fields, and said −
as much to himself as to me −
‘… as if she could make a nation
from shabby-genteel
pining for some ancient twilight…’
then looking up, smiled broadly,
‘I am far from Innisfree and the Salley Gardens.’
When I rose to leave, I handed him the book;
he opened it, and spidery on the flyleaf
signed, An aimless
joy is a pure joy − W.B. Yeats.
He walked with me
as far as the bridge, asking was my return fare in order,
then in the pocket of my old coat
slyly slipped a two-shilling piece.
I saw Yeats one other time…
I took to painting shop fronts with Tom Boylan,
and from a side street on to Grafton, one day
in August of ‘38,
we watched the people eddy by,
and putting by our paint rags
stepped out to see the swirling crowd disappearing
at the corner, and with it, in a biscuit suit
the man himself, centred
head-and-shoulders over all, a mop
of white unruly hair in an island of sunlight.
I told Tom about my meeting
those years before, and of the two-shilling souvenir.
He looked at me, but never called me liar,
and I could never prove it different: the money
quickly spent, and as for the other…
back at Waterford
and thinking on all I should have said, realised
too late the book
I’d daydreamed through, The Winding Stair, I’d left behind
on an empty seat, aboard the Dublin train.
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