Wednesday, October 18, 2017

There we are walking along the post-storm streets of Dublin,the streets my mother walked years before, I light a candle with thought, without belief, in St Theresa's, Clarendon Street. A candle for her and all those gone before us marked (some would say scarred) with the sign of faith.Our loved ones. Out again, there's a coolness in the air, a calmness, a warmth in the sky and I think out of that/the blue, 'Lapus Lazuli.' I say it out loud, Lapis Lazuli, It feels like two nice marbles rolling an alliterating joy in my mouth up to my brain. I'm not 100% sure what exactly it is, a precious/semi precious gemstone? A title for a new poetry magazine? I know nothing of the double L. We wander in to The National Library, I like the carved wooden breasts on the fireplace, perhaps you are not supposed to touch, but I do, then we wander down to the Yeats exhibition and there out of another blue, a lump, a block, a real piece of 'Lapus Lazuli' in all it's glory. New to me, spookily co-incidental in a darkened room touching on Yeats' fascination with the occult. Then I learn something. A tour guide explains that the Yeats family wanted a quiet funeral for Willy, but his fame would not allow it, so they packed his body off to a rented tomb in France but forgot/omitted to pay the rent and his coffin was turfed out amongst the hoi polloi francaise.
Then war broke out and WB's coffin could not be returned to be buried in Drumcliffe 'til hostilities had ended. By then who knew which coffin was which? There are major doubts that Yeats is buried under bare Ben Bulben's head at all! If not him then qui? And if qui is not il then ou est William? Mon Dieu, quelle question!