the photo shows his
good looks clear as anything
— this is a surprise —
but, to me, the real shock
is the fact that I’m surprised

This is doubtless confusing for the reader: so I must explain. There are 3 or 4 separate images in question, all conflated deliberately.
The poem refers to Leo Trainor, my Irish great-grandfather, who was a music hall artist at the beginning of the 20th century. I must have been in my teens when I first saw a photo of him. It showed him looking quite grotesque in drag, and anything but attractive. But then, less than ten years ago, I saw another photo. This one shows him as himself, wearing a fashionable ‘boater’ of the time. He looks dapper. But his life was a tragedy. My surprise at his good looks taught me to feel a bit ashamed: I had been thinking of him perhaps as some kind of illiterate peasant from Ireland — almost a leprechaun rather than a human being. My pride in my Irish ancestry was all mixed up with an idealisation of the Celtic races for their association (in my mind) with pagan spirituality, and also with feeling sorry for my ancestor who had been viewed as a monster by his wife’s family, because he gave up his livelihood as a tailor in order to tread the boards (coming back home less and less as time went on, so that the family starved). But here suddenly was a very worldly-looking man in the prime of his life, needing nobody’s pity — indeed, looking far more capable in every way than me who had always identified with him. I was quite the black sheep of the family myself, though for different reasons.
The 2nd image I’m using (though it’s a literary image not a visual one) is the Tarot card The Hanged Man. All through the eighties and nineties, this was a firm association. Hanged Man = Leo Trainor.
Thirdly, the image itself is of the Roman god Mithras. He sprang to mind this morning as being the closest I can get to the quality of pathos I see in Leo Trainor’s photo, and life.
Interestingly, both Mithras and The Hanged Man are connected with sacrifice.
My dream last night was of Leo Trainor’s grandson David, who does in fact share his grandfather’s good looks. Or did. He is an old man now. In the dream, I saw him at the wheel of a car, and thought to myself just simply what I’ve just said: he shares his grandfather’s good looks. Dreaming of David Trainor is a result of having yesterday done some work on a poem about Leo Trainor’s daughter, my grandmother. Here it is in its reworked form. I wrote it originally in the late nineties.
Tess
Best of all my family,
I loved my grandmother —
her venom and her vigour.
I loved her insufferable
vindictiveness, straitlaced severity
— her Christian morals directed
hardest against the very things
she loved most — with an exuberance
of the imagination, frenzy,
even humour. All things bright,
blood-red and beautiful —
she damned them all.