Dublin. It is often referred to by a few of my new friends as the “big smoke” (then again, so is London, right?). I imagine this nickname is well earned from cold mornings and coal fires stoked up in all the tiny fireplaces. It’s winter. Dead on. Today I came out onto my balcony and looked out over the North Wall all the way out to the Dublin Mountains (hills, really, they are hills). Smoke clumped and then it wearily took an exit as the wind stirred. Then the ritual repeated in the air.
It’s not that cold, but 11C is frigid for some. I don’t why I am so impervious to cold weather. Why it doesn’t affect me much. If anything, I could go colder on this whole winter thing. I thought maybe it would be darker too. And when will the strange static electricity of the vastness begin a dance or two on the horizon. Green flash fairy, a dance of pent up storm suns. String up the air with it. I’m ready.
Still some hate all of this. The cold, the rain, the damp, the breath of death on the neck to remind you you should have brought a scarf.
I joined a writer’s group. And though we meet once a week, politely sitting around in the Westin occasionally complaining about the hotel musak being too loud, we slog through our various works, we brave one another as audience. So the woman who runs this workshop invited me to a Thursday morning one. But this one is different. It’s a few writers (well, including me, it would be 3 or 4) who talk about Dublin as a place. Who sit around in a cafe in the basement of the Museum of Literature and deep map Dublin in conversation and then we read poems about Dublin, strange outtakes from old books, look at books called Rivers of Dublin and then discuss the odd project to set our sails for on next week’s horizon. So my project was to pick a river in Dublin and write about it. Investigate it. Map it. Photo it. Sketch it. Understand it. Throw something into it.
So I have you now? River Tolka. River, river, river. I think of river teeth. That old exercise. What has river teeth? Memories of summer. That summer when… Very American it is, those wistful summer memories.
So far my impression of the Tolka is this. Walking home at the beginning of fall. The moon rose full and it was a Sturgeon Moon. I paused on the bridge going over the Tolka in the moonlight, me and a few Irish in fact, and I heard something lightly sucking at the water below. I leaned off the railing only to see these large, silvery, slow fish rising and falling in the moonlit water. Coming up like koi or carp to mouth the water meets air boundary. But they looked different. Salmon at the end of their migration run? I asked someone. Naw, day are mullet there, he said. And pointed to the shapes rising and falling. They are good to eat if ya can catch ’em. They’s hard catch though.
I took a few photos of the moon and left for home. And whenever I walk over the Tolka, I pause, lean over the dark waters and look for those fish. But I haven’t seen them again.
