Pure Chemicals

And pure luck that there happened to be workers in the windows, giving it that little extra something. I've always liked this Victorian building, once Finn's Hotel, where Nora Barnacle worked as a chambermaid (the faded white letters are still on the wall, just around the corner. It has been a dental hospital for ages now. They have been doing renovation work there for a good while, and the scaffolding has been removed fairly recently. The bricks look cleaner anyway, as red as inflamed gums.

Spotted the above image on the way back from a meeting with my friend J, our regular lunch in the NGI. We had an interesting talk, as usual, 'a nice little canter'. Later, walking J back to his Poetry Ireland office on the far side of Stephen's Green, we passed the statue of Emmet, strolling on its plinth, head in the tree-canopy. TWO MEN ON THE GRASS to the right caught my attention (the one sitting up is either avoiding the lens or perhaps just feeling fed up). We then went to look at the head of Mangan, haloed in magnolia leaves, which J had written about recently. As we parted the conversation had meandered into a discussion of when one should just leave a poem to present an incident, give it as cleanly as possible to to the reader, without superfluous commentary; usually the best idea with one-image poems, since that image should contain everything that might be inferred). Notg enought time in the day for chats like this.