Gainor Crist, a new poem by Harry Clifton

Darragh O’Connell 1952-2018

Who the hell was Gainor Crist
You and I once asked.
Was he a genius? An also-ran?
Was he the Ginger Man

Floating about Dublin in tweeds,
Frequenting the usual bars,
Affecting art, in the strange years
After the War, on a trail that leads

Us both to a time before birth
Where Mainie Jellett, in her digs,
Paints a man naked, stretched at her hearth,
An orange between his legs,

And Harry Kernoff, debonair,
And minor cubists, here and there,
Deconstruct and recreate
The birth of the Irish Free State . . .

A city attaches itself to his name –
Whole summers, before we were born,
Gone like the sound of the Dublin foghorn
Or the rumour he became.

Did he not die, as word would have it,
Drunk and penniless in Spain
A year out of Dublin, never seen again?
There are people like that,

Famous for being unknown,
Gone south, like Gainor Crist
Or you, dear friend, whose mystery
Will some day be my own.

Harry Clifton’s most recent collections are Herod’s Dispensations and Portobello Sonnets (both Bloodaxe)