HADES
Charon trades his ferry for a carriage and transports three to Hades.
A fourth traveler by the name of Bloom joins the damned.
Suicides rises in the conversation like an animated corpse.
It is Bloom's father. His shadow is his grandson. Rudy.
Rudy wears an impossible Eton suit
Impossible for he is a little Lazarus without a Jesus.
Bloom spots his second son, also mourning
Telemachus has just missed Odysseus
Irish Casanova greets the carriage
Bloom looks at his nails. Boylan is a carpenter.
Molly does need some fixing. Hammer and....
From the graves poke out gramophones
Gramophones whose mouths resemble sunflowers.
Bring the sunflower to your ear; a boy laughs.
The man in the mackintosh tends to the records.
Meanwhile the priest pours Latin over Dignam
The last drops of prayer are dirt and the shovels' mouths say:
In paradisum
And in the green of the eternal, a well-dressed man of ruddy beard
Free of poison, carried on his shoulders a boy in an Eton suit.
The boy's mouth wide in joy, but soundless
And the sunflower never laughed and Bloom tossed that world away.