It’s fuck off time.

The lights have shot up the room and the barman has been murmurating around the floorscape for the last half an hour, playing Tetris with the chairs and sighing like death row. Upon the table stands a graveyard of the evening:

Glasses empty but for thin cables of foam fighting gravity in a race to the bottom.
Shadows of their former selves; even the candle at the centre of the table,
much like ourselves gathered round it, is in a little pool of liquid
and living on borrowed time.
Finally a sense of civic responsibility washes over
the general air of craic distlls; and the group arises.
We leave our post as only the drunk do; that staggered herd formation. Gnus concussed.
Out the door and onto the city centre street whatever conversation, friend or foe, finds a second wind up until the Irish night insists so much of itself that the threat of hypothermia too insistent to ignore.

Moving through the crowd, drunken but determined, passing by the many fine people whose company I have enjoyed as the clock ticked the day to cinders; I’m minded for rekindling the conversation with coveted company. All evening I’ve enjoyed the diving deep into her eyes, with the idealistic hope that I might lose myself between her thighs.

‘Christ, it’s colder than a penguin’s bollocks,’ says I, in her general direction, attracting the attention of her bit of the crowd. The response is an appropriate level of mirth.

‘You know, I’m not sure penguins have bollockses- whether male or female, each have what is called a ‘cloaca.’’

‘Okay, I’ll be honest, I’ve never wanted to look that hard,’ I bow out.

‘Please never tell me how you know that,’ says another.

I turn to the smile I’ve been looking for all night and, praise be to the great whatever wherever the fuck, there it is. Beaming at me, or at least that’s how I see it. A sight to see. Incline my head slightly, with an arch of the eyebrows, which I hope asks if she will allow me to accompany her on the walk that should see her safely to her door. Another cause for prayer of thanks, as she responds with the appropriate nod of the head.

Now all that’s left is for one last circle of goodbyes, interrupting an evening-long debate which has suddenly got very heated, probably to keep its participants warm in the fresh October weather of this typical Irish June.

There’s always an awkward silence at moments such as these, when a group changes in number and composition and the craic must be reconfigured to the new setting by those who remain. Re-establishing a workable politic takes a moment of patience. Such are my feelings towards this person, I am more than happy to tenderly sup the minutes like a good whiskey. Also, I’ve had quite a bit of whiskey and my reflexes aren’t what they once were, in the old days of a few hours ago.

‘Had I the heavens embroidered…’

‘Fuck off,’ swings down her swift reply.

‘…’ says I.

‘Were you seriously going to try and Yeats me into bed?’

‘Well, in the absence of a better, more original strategy; things to say to beautiful women can often seem like the Haley’s comet of language.’

‘See, that was pretty smooth but entirely undermined by the fact you opened like a nineteen year old cliché.’

‘Alright,’ conceding.

‘I mean Yeats’ poetry didn’t even work for Yeats.’

‘Nothing worked for Yeats, in fairness. Yeats barely worked himself.’

‘I read a book recently where one character says, as a passing comment, no one who likes Yeats is capable of human intimacy.¹ That was a pretty good gag.’

‘I can’t help but feel personally attacked, but also aye… that’s a nice line. What can you expect from a fella who lost his virginity at age thirty to a woman who took him bed shopping the afternoon before?’

‘Not to mention a fella who proposed to the same woman three times, and after three rejections tried it on with her daughter.’

‘Aye, Maud Gonne; or as she was known in some circles of Newry, gonne maud.’

She flashes my way a good smile of good joke, well received, as we walk and I feel gratified in the place where the heart meets the cock.

‘Yeats was pretty much, to most people in his life, what Fr. Stone was to Fr. Ted. You can just imagine him sauntering around Lissadell House, not really saying anything and, like a sunflower, turning with the sun.’

‘There’s a lot about the man that was funny, but less in the ha-ha sense and more in the sense that milk can be funny,’ says she, ‘…of course, we’re skirting round the issue that he was a fascist.’

‘Awk, he wasn’t really a fascist. Not proper like. He was just odd, and fascism was very much vogue at the time til that big Austrian fecker went and spoiled it. Have you ever seen Yeats design- suggested design- for the Supreme Court robes?’

‘No…’

‘Imagine a technicolour druid. Less like something a professional lawyer would wear, and more like something on one of the monkeys from the Wizard of Oz.’

‘Aw Jesus, that’s so en-brand… okay, so he was odd, but the thing is, he was an establishment figure. He wasn’t some harmless auld gobshite bumbling round a wizard’s tower in Galway; he was in the Seanad!’

‘Ah, but to counter that point: he was in the Seanad.’

‘…’ says she, communication of the mind punctuated by a prodding stare.

‘The Seanad is a chorale of political eunuchs. It’s where they send all their gobshites in the South that are so afflicted with chronic gobshitery that they can’t even get the lesser gobshites round the country to vote for them. And that’s Yeats basically… a minority of a minority, in every respect. You have to feel a wee bit of sympathy for him just by virtue of the fact that not only was he a Protestant in Ireland, difficult enough; but he was a poor Protestant in Ireland. Worst of all possible worlds.’

‘Alright, that’s a point well-made. You know, you’re much more attractive when you’re making a sound argument with a solid bit of reasoning, rather than some twee acclamation of love, with basic rhyme scheme, that might work in America but not out here in the real world,’ at the end of these words I get a sense of the roaring fire of a lively debate, with the gentle warmth of friendship, flickering in her eyes.

‘I’m never going to live that down, am I?’

‘Nah,’ swings her axe again.

‘If I might proffer some kind of defence, I suppose as much to Yeats as well as myself, that poem I was starting there the evidence that he wasn’t completely without self-awareness. It was written as a pisstake.’

‘Well, a job well done I guess…’

‘Yeah,’ passing over that last remark, not really hearing it as I already had my next sentences racked up and ready to go, ‘it was a spoof of the sort of twenty something poet who writes the sort of long and winding tomes of love and devotion, when in reality they’ve never really had much encounter with a genuine breast.’

‘Any chance you’re verging on speaking autobiographically here?’ She lets loose one of those slegging smiles, and my cock starts writing its wedding vows.

‘Ha fucking ha – shove it up your arse.’

‘Kinky.’

‘Besides, I’m nowhere near a poet; I just sometimes write sentences that don’t come to the end of the page. I’m not even sure you can call someone a poet while their still alive anyway.’

‘No, poetry is more the end result, looking back on a life that was lived. While you’re alive, you’re just kind of writing…’

…………………… ‘…so you’ve not been adequately acquainted with living, breathing tits?’

‘Not in terms of desire, at the very least. Hopefully I’m currently living in the morning of my experiences.’ In saying this, I cross the fingers of the hand inside my pocket. ‘

While the conversation carried us off on a journey through each other’s minds, and the backroads of Irish history and literature, our legs were doing the brunt work of carrying us from the dazzling lack of lights of city centre to the leafy citadel of the student quarter. Now I’m pulled back down to my feet by her announcement that we’ve reached her door.

‘Thanks for walking me home,’ says she as we turn to face each other, in the autumnal light of the streetlamps.

‘No worries, it was a good walk. Rounded off the evening nicely.’

‘D’you wanna come inside and warm up a bit? I think I’ve got a bottle of wine somewhere; though if you’re going to start getting all poetic and start reciting again then I should warn you I’ll accept nothing less than John Cooper Clarke or above.’

‘Depending on the night is going, would you take a bit of Leonard Cohen?’

‘Mmmmhmmm,’ with a crooked smiled-look faux consideration, ‘perhaps I could be brought round to Suzanne, but if you start crooning I’m Your Man to me then I’m leaving immediately and joining a convent out of spite.’

‘Fair dos, it’s nice to know in advance…’

Surely you already know the scene that we enter at this stage. That of a red brick little centurion that has sat in quiet witness to the last tumultuous century. Bay windows to the roof; black mould to the ceiling. This sort of house probably had at least a semblance of grandeur about it, when it had it’s ‘burning youth,’ though the depravity of landlords and the apathy of students has seen it fall into the shadows of its memory.

Our heels clack in beatnik teenage symphony on the unswept tiled floor, as I follow her into her house away from home. Though not provided with much of a canvas, she has managed to project her charm onto it through covering up the worst of the stains on the wall with books, and a strategic smattering of fairy lights.

I’m perusing the titles along one shelf, when she appears at my side, with a tumbler of wine in her left hand and another in her right. The former, she holds out to me, and I accept with a note of thanks.

‘Are there any others?’ Combined with a generalising gesture to inquire if there might be sleeping housemates in the vicinity.

‘Yeah, there’s a Chinese girl- I don’t know her too well, but she’s nice enough- and then there’s another girl from Derry but she tends to go home at the weekends, more often than not.’ I give this a nod, making a mental note as to the appropriate noise level.

With a confidence akin to that of a baby deer in winter, I extend my arm to place my free hand on her side, thumb just under her ribcage and fingers arched around her waist. As we stand now as physically close as I’ve been feeling she looks at me with eyes soft and lips inviting.

We close the final gap and our lips meet in one gentle kiss. We close our eyes for our lips to kiss that we might vacation from the world for the merest fragment of our lives, which in the grand scheme of everything that will be, will rise like smoke from fire. We close our eyes, and thus when we kiss the lips whose soul has captivated our desire and captured our existence, only our lips exist in a manner which may be said with definition to be true. All that we are, that they do not touch, might as well be stardust as it was when the universe saw the very first dawn. The only dawn which was truly hopeful, and without any trace of loss.

As we all into each other’s lips, the rest of the night in question becomes a warm memory fairly fuzzy round the edges, harshly punctuated by the chill arrogance of the morning after as I leave her door in order to continue being a person, but at least armed with a smile, and the shadow of an erection that had lived a full life. This will see me through whatever the next while has in store.

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¹  Rooney, S. Conversations With Friends, London: Faber and Faber

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Fionnbharr Rodgers is an Irish historian and poet who has had work published in History Ireland, Ireland’s Own, The Irish Times, Northern Slant, A New Ulster, Blackbird, Blackbox Manifold, and Stoneboat Literary Journal. 

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