Ulysses
*
Stephen Dedalus watched through the webbed win-
dow the lapidary’s fingers prove a timedulled chain. Dust
webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust darkened the
toiling fingers with their vulture nails. Dust slept on dull
coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies,
leprous and winedark stones.
Born all in the dark wormy earth, cold specks of fire,
evil, lights shining in the darkness. Where fallen archangels
flung the stars of their brows. Muddy swinesnouts, hands,
root and root, gripe and wrest them.
She dances in a foul gloom where gum bums with garlic.
A sailorman, rustbearded, sips from a beaker rum and eyes
her. A long and seafed silent rut. She dances, capers, wag-
ging her sowish haunches and her hips, on her gross belly
flapping a ruby egg.
Old Russell with a smeared shammy rag burnished
again his gem, turned it and held it at the point of his Mo-
ses’ beard. Grandfather ape gloating on a stolen hoard.
And you who wrest old images from the burial earth?
The brainsick words of sophists: Antisthenes. A lore of
drugs. Orient and immortal wheat standing from everlast-
ing to everlasting.
Two old women fresh from their whiff of the briny
trudged through Irishtown along London bridge road, one
with a sanded tired umbrella, one with a midwife’s bag in
which eleven cockles rolled.
The whirr of flapping leathern bands and hum of dyna-
mos from the powerhouse urged Stephen to be on. Beingless