Scrutiny
In the Summer of 2018 I was visited in my home in the Wicklow Mountains by two people who I hadn't seen for nearly ten years. Both artists, both living in Berlin, both important friends from the past. But each from a different past. They came as part of a project which involved one month travelling the roads of Ireland making portraits and drawing landscapes.
When they stepped through my door for a six hour portraiture session that would last well into the small hours, it was the first time the three of us had ever been in the same room together.
Christopher is someone I have known from primary school. We travelled through those explosive years of adolescence together, hung around the fringes of our estate, played music together, growing up nudging each others' shoulder until we unintentionally went our separate ways - in that inexplicable sundering that happens sometimes between close friends.
David I met almost immediately after this time, in a café in Dublin City where we worked into the night, locked up shop and sat in the rising heat of nightime Temple Bar, smoking from the first floor window before entering the current that would take us through pubs and riverfronts and squats, pliable and accepting of what came our way.
When they met each other in Berlin years later, they soon found that they had me in common. And in a serpentine way, this led them to my house where I sat before the stove, four am, the past, present in the grainy arms length between me and them. Each silent. Each poised over their page. Seeing me through different filters. Through different shimmers of time. And between us three. Communication.
In the hours I sat, silent under their scrutiny, I composed a response in verse to the scratch of their charcoal on paper. And after, as we sat at the table, drinking the last drink, they showed their pieces and I scribbled the words down. To explain the experience. To reflect, in some way, the disrupted ties between us three. The stitched history. Three sketches. Complete. But not finished.
Scrutiny
​
Over the mountains they come
In an import rental car
Driving on the left
Tourists in their own land
From Berlin
Where they’d met
In a warehouse exhibition
Shoes worn thin
And found me in common
And shared stories
That became myth
Until they come with tin boxes
Full of charcoal
To do my portrait
And I sit where they say
My face heavy where
They hang their eyes
Searching for lines
That journey
On midnight light
From eye through hand
Tincture of what once they knew
Sopped up along the way
Sit forever
Until I feel the mask slide
Feel my blood flow
Feel my hair grow
To the sound of charcoal scratch
Dirty on the white
One looking, scratching, quick
The other's slow regard,
Falling to deep scribing
The thick paper unseen
Takes the abuse
A two am break,
Words usher softly,
I move
In movement, we speak,
And we smoke one
Drink a glass in the night garden
Pissing beneath the stars
Drops pearling the grass
I speak of the ancient dark,
Where poets lay
A stone upon their chest
A day or more,
Travelling through verse
Until the thing was done
Laid out – complete
And we are somewhere else
​
We return to it
Studied
As my eyes simmer
Around the edges
Burning with the scene
Threaded between them
To the table beyond
To the three bottles
Stood in welcome
One humming amber
With complexity
One straw coloured
Dependable and warming
One sloe-stained
From a Connemara still
A red fucking firecracker
And I concentrate
On composing
A verse portrait
In response
Frozen without pen
Without paper
Without room
To lip the words
Their scrutiny
The stone on my chest
