BALBUS WAS
BUILDING A WALL
That's from James Joyce, and I'm telling
you now it didn't really exist. In Portrait
Of the Artist As A Young Man, it's a
descriptive gag, like a guinea-run rag,
high head over heels in the Irish morning.
Stars and befuddles. Stephen gets cuddles.
He stays in his sickbed one day.
-
We always start off - it seems - small and
young. Now why that is, not too many know.
Even the girls among us, they start that way
too. Flat, and smooth, and hairless. That's all
determined beforehand for each of us. One by
one these boys arrive. With measuring sticks
together, measuring their size. It hadn't ought
to be like that, I grant, but that it is.
-
Out behind the chapel hall, the wide church
reminds itself of something. Those rank Jesuits,
and their twirling whips. They play at being
men and arrive together, prayers and beads,
like fat old mother hens, or geese along
the edge of a filthy pond.
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