Wayside Tarot, Temple Bar

On my way to my cousin Isobel's place for dinner, I decided to walk through Temple Bar. I passed The Bank of Ireland, turned off Dame Street, and was plunged into a different world. Someone on my right (in a laughing group of young ones) screamed out like a street vendor: 'Newspapers! Drugs! Anyone for drugs?!'

Temple bar on any Saturday is hectic. Only a short stretch, a few hundred yards from Fleet Street to Parliament Street, but as you enter its cobbled canyon you need at least some of your wits about you. A clogged artery of clubs, pubs, art galleries, buskers, tourists, battery-hen-parties, backpackers, dippers, dealers, druggies and apprentice alcoholics, it is the longest, densest inebriated/anesthetized pedestrianized zone in the city. Coming up to Christmas it's the rapids. So I was struck by this wee pool of apparent calmness, a Tarot-reader waiting for customers. It seemed fitting though, as the greater Temple can accommodate anything in its depths and shallows. As it happens, I once wrote a poem about palm-reading, and my superstitious/sceptical reluctance to have mine 'done':

Two Readings

No one has read my palm.
I won’t let them.

Not that I believe those lines
more meaningful than canals
on Mars, but to display
the soft pink valleys, how they
might read to a strange-eyed stranger ––

‘The life-line’s fractured
and there seems to be…’ ‘What?’ ‘No, nothing.’

And how long’s a frayed piece of string?

*

Now, examining them closely

under the reading lamp,
I tilt them this way and that,
as if the official stamp

of age –– overscored lines
crosshatching into a fine
scrollwork of loosening nets ––

might be a forgery.