Chez Jeanette
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop …
– WB Yeats
And so do I, past fifty now,
In the gilt and mirror-glass
Of Chez Jeanette’s immigrant bar.
Wine, cassis, an overflow
Spilt on the table – marble
Like Yeats’ but more of a mess.
Behind the bottles on the shelf
A real, a transcendental self
Is hiding. Great Master,
Tell me, as you sat with your cup,
And grace came down like interruption,
Did these flakes of ceiling plaster
Also drown in your dregs?
The fallen angels, broken spirits
Told like tea-leaves, disinherited,
Sold into Egypt? Child-wives, pregnant,
Hide the future, keep it dark.
Splinter-groups of young Turks
Stand at the counter, arguing.
And the saucers of small change
Accumulate. The minutes, the hours,
If grace or visitation
Ever enter ... A prostitute,
Bottom of the range,
Her hangdog client, middle-aged,
Go next door, to the short-time hotel.
In the hour that God alone sees,
We are all anonymities,
No-one finds us, we cannot be paged
In Dante’s Heaven, Swedenborg’s Hell
Or the visions of William Yeats.
And whether the hour is early or late
Or out of time, I do not know.
But for now, it comes down to this –
The marble top, the wine, cassis,
And the finite afterglow.
Poetry Ireland Review Issue 116:
A WB Yeats Special Issue
This essential Yeats anniversary publication is edited by Vona Groarke and includes responses to Yeats’s legacy and readings of his poems from public figures as diverse as Bill Whelan, Neil Jordan, Colm Tóibín, Frank McGuinness, Mary Costello and John Banville, along with new poems responding to Yeats’s work by Irish and international poets such as Margaret Atwood, Sharon Olds, Philip Schultz, Sinéad Morrissey and Harry Clifton. The issue also includes Yeats’s poetry collections, reviewed by leading poets as if just published. Now also available in hardback.
"superb special edition" John Boland, Irish Independent
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