by Paul Muldoon
(both were frozen over)
and, no less strange,
myself calling out in French
across that forest-
clearing. Neither General Jeffrey Amherst
nor Colonel Henry Bouquet
could stomach our willow-tobacco.
As for the unusual
scent when the Colonel shook out his hand-
kerchief: C’est la lavande,
une fleur mauve comme le ciel.
They gave us six fishhooks
and two blankets embroidered with smallpox.
Christo’s
Two workmen were carrying a sheet of asbestos
down the Main Street of Dingle;
it must have been nailed, at a slight angle,
to the same-sized gap between Brandon
and whichever’s the next mountain.
Nine o’clock. We watched the village dogs
take turns to spritz the hotel’s refuse-sacks.
I remembered Tralee’s unbiodegradable flags
from the time of the hunger-strikes.
We drove all day past mounds of sugar-beet,
hay-stacks, silage-pits, building-sites,
a thatched cottage even –
all of them draped in black polythene
and weighted against the north-east wind
by concrete blocks, old tyres; bags of sand
at a makeshift army post
across the border. By the time we got to Belfast
the whole of Ireland would be under wraps
like, as I said, ‘one of your man’s landscapes’.
‘Your man’s? You don’t mean Christo’s?’
The Fox
Such an alarm
as was raised last night
by the geese
on John Mackle’s goose-farm.
I got up and opened
the venetian blind.
You lay
three fields away
in Collegelands
graveyard, in ground
so wet you weren’t so much
buried there as drowned.
That was a month ago.
I see your face
above its bib
pumped full of formaldehyde.
You seem engrossed,
as if I’d come on you
painfully writing your name
with a carpenter’s pencil
on the lid
of a mushroom-box.
You’re saying, Go back to bed.
It’s only yon dog-fox.
The Soap-Pig
I must have been dozing in the tub
when the telephone
rang and a small, white grub
crawled along the line
and into my head:
Michael Heffernan was dead.
All I could think of
was his Christmas present
from what must have been 1975.
It squatted there on the wash-stand,
an amber, pig-shaped
bar of soap.
He had breezed into Belfast
in a three-quarter-length coney-fur
to take up the post
of Drama Producer
with the still-reputable Beeb,
where I had somehow wangled a job.
Together we learned from Denys
Hawthorne and Allan McClelland
to float, like Saint Gennys,
on our own hands
through airwaves mostly jammed by cub
reporters and poisoned pups.
He liked to listen at full tilt
to bootleg tapes
of Ian Paisley’s assaults
on Papes,
regretful only that they weren’t in quad.
His favourite word was quidditas.
I could just see the Jesuitical,
kitsch-camp slip-
knot in the tail
of even that bar of soap.
For this was Heffernan
saying, ‘You stink to high heaven.’
Which I well knew. Many’s an Arts Club
night with Barfield and Mason
ended with me throwing up
at the basin.
Anne-Marie looked on, her unspoken,
‘That’s to wash, not boke in.’
This, or any, form of self-regard
cut no ice
with Michael, who’d undergone heart
surgery at least twice
while I knew him. On a trip
once to the Wexford slobs
he and I had shared
a hotel room. When he slipped
off his shirt
there were two unfashionably broad lap-
els where the surgeons had sawn
through the xylophone
on which he liked to play
Chopin or Chop-
sticks until he was blue
in the face; be-bop, doo-wop:
they’d given him a tiny, plastic valve
that would, it seemed, no more dissolve
than the soap-pig I carried
on successive flits
from Marlborough Park (and Anne-Marie)
to the Malone Avenue flat
(Chez Moy, it was later dubbed)
to the rented house in Dub (as in Dub-
lin) Lane,
until, at last, in Landseer Street
Mary unpeeled its cellophane
and it landed on its feet
among porcelain, glass and heliotrope
pigs from all parts of the globe.
When we went on holiday to France
our house-sitter was troub-
led by an unearthly fragrance
at one particular step
on the landing. It was no pooka,
of course, but the camomile soap-pig
that Mary, in a fit of pique,
would later fling into the back yard.
As I unpicked
the anthracite-shards
from its body, I glimpsed the scrab-
nosed, condemned slab
of our sow that dropped
dead from a chill in 1966,
its uneven litter individually wrapped
in a banana box
with polystyrene and wood-shavings;
this time Mary was leaving,
taking with her the gold
and silver pigs, the ivory.
For Michael Heffernan, the common cold
was an uncommon worry
that might as easily have stopped
him in his tracks. He’d long since escaped
Belfast for London’s dog-eat-dog
back-stab
and leap-frog.
More than once he collap-
sed at his desk. But Margaret
would steady him through the Secretariat
towards their favourite restaurant
where, given my natural funk
I think of as restraint,
I might have avoided that Irish drunk
whose slow jibes
Michael parried, but whose quick jab
left him forever at a loss for words.
For how he would delib-
erate on whether two six-foot boards
sealed with ship’s
varnish and two tea-chests
(another move) on which all this rests
is a table; or this merely a token
of some ur-chair,
or – being broken –
a chair at all: the mind’s a razor
on the body’s strop.
And the soap-pig? It’s a bar of soap,
now the soap-sliver
in a flowered dish
that I work each morning into a lather
with my father’s wobbling-brush,
then reconcile to its pool of glop
on my mother’s wash-stand’s marble top.
from MADOC: A MYSTERY
The Key
I ran into Foley six months
ago in a dubbing suite in Los Angeles. He was halfway through post-production on a remake of The Hoodlum Priest, a film for which I’ve a special affection since my cousin Marina McCall was an extra in the first version. She had worked as a nanny for various movie stars, including Tippi Hedren, and seemed to spend half her time in the sky between New York and LA. Though I sat through three or four showings of The Hoodlum Priest in the Olympic Cinema, Moy, and carefully scrutinized the crowd scenes, I was never able to point to Marina with anything like conviction.
Foley was working on a sequence involving a police line-up, in which the victim shuffled along, stopped with each suspect in turn, then shuffled on. At a critical moment, she dropped a key on the floor. Foley was having trouble matching sound to picture on this last effect. I was struck by the fact that, just as early radio announcers had worn dinner-jackets, he was wearing an ultramarine tuxedo. After half a dozen attempts, he decided to call it quits, and emerged from his sound booth like a diver from a bathyscope. He offered me a tidbit that tasted only of mesquite.
I wanted to say something about Marina, something about an ‘identity parade’ in which I once took part, something about the etymology of ‘tuxedo’, but I found myself savouring the play between ‘booth’ and ‘bathy-’, ‘quits’ and ‘mesquite’, and began to ‘misquote’ myself:
When he sookied a calf down a boreen
it was through Indo-European.
When he clicked at a donkey carting dung
your grandfather had an African tongue.
You seem content to ventriloquize the surf.
Foley swallowed whatever it was:
Still defending that same old patch of turf?
Have you forgotten that ‘hoodlum’ is back-slang
for the leader of a San Francisco street-gang?
He flounced off into his cubicle. Though this, our only exchange, was remarkable for its banality, Foley has had some profound effect on me. These past six months I’ve sometimes run a little ahead of myself, but mostly I lag behind, my footfalls already pre-empted by their echoes.
Tea
I was rooting through tea-chest after tea-chest
as they drifted in along Key West
when I chanced on Pythagoras in America:
the book had fallen open at a book-mark
of tea; a tassel
of black watered silk from a Missal;
a tea-bird’s black tail-feather.
All I have in the house is some left-over
squid cooked in its own ink
and this unfortunate cup of tea. Take it. Drink.
The Panther
For what it’s worth, the last panther in Massachusetts
was brought to justice
in the woods beyond these meadows
and hung by its heels from a meat-hook
in what is now our kitchen.
(The house itself is something of a conundrum,
built as it was by an Ephraim Cowan from Antrim.)
I look in one evening while Jean
is jelly-making. She has rendered down pounds of grapes
and crab-apples
to a single jar
at once impenetrable and clear:
‘Something’s missing. This simply won’t take.’
The air directly under the meat-hook –
it quakes, it quickens;
on a flagstone, the smudge of the tippy-tip of its nose.
Cauliflowers
Plants that glow in the dark have been developed through gene-splicing, in which light-producing bacteria from the mouths of fish are introduced to cabbage, carrots and potatoes.
The National Enquirer
More often than not he stops at the headrig to light
his pipe
and try to regain
his composure. The price of cauliflowers
has gone down
two weeks in a row on the Belfast market.
From here we can just make out
a platoon of Light
Infantry going down
the road to the accompaniment of a pipe-
band. The sun glints on their silver-
buttoned jerkins.
My uncle, Patrick Regan,
has been leaning against the mud-guard
of the lorry. He levers
open the bonnet and tinkers with a light
wrench at the hose-pipe
that’s always going down.
Then he himself goes down
to bleed oil into a jerry-can.
My father slips the pipe
into his scorch-marked
breast pocket and again makes light
of the trepanned cauliflowers.
All this as I listened to lovers
repeatedly going down
on each other in the next room … ‘light
of my life …’ in a motel in Oregon.
All this. Magritte’s
pipe
and the pipe-
bomb. White Annetts. Gillyflowers.
Margaret,
are you grieving? My father going down
the primrose path with Patrick Regan.
All gone out of the world of light.
All gone down
the original pipe. And the cauliflowers
in an unmarked pit, that were harvested by their own light.
The Briefcase
for Seamus Heaney
I held the briefcase at arm’s length from me;
the oxblood or liver
eelskin with which it was covered
had suddenly grown supple.
I’d been waiting in line for the cross-town
bus when an almighty cloudburst
left the sidewalk a raging torrent.
And though it contained only the first
inkling of this poem, I knew I daren’t
set the briefcase down
to slap my pockets for an obol –
for fear it might slink into a culvert
and strike out along the East River
for the sea. By which I mean the ‘open’ sea.
from THE ANNALS OF CHILE
Brazil
When my mother snapped open her flimsy parasol
it was Brazil: if not Brazil,
then Uruguay.
One nipple darkening her smock.
My shame-faced Tantum Ergo
struggling through thurified smoke.
*
Later that afternoon would find
me hunched over the font
as she rinsed my hair. Her towel-turban.
Her terrapin
comb scuttling under the faucet.
I stood there in my string vest
and shorts while she repeated, ‘Champi…?
Champi…? Champi…?’ Then,
that bracelet of shampoo
about the bone, her triumphant ‘ChampiÑON’.
*
If not Uruguay, then Ecuador:
it must be somewhere on or near the equator
given how water
plunged headlong into water
when she pulled the plug.
So much for the obliq-
uity of leaving What a Boy Should Know
under my pillow: now vagina and vas
deferens made a holy show
of themselves. ‘There is inherent vice
in everything,’ as O’Higgins
would proclaim: it was O’Higgins who duly
had the terms ‘widdershins’
and ‘deasil’ expunged from the annals of Chile.
The Sonogram
Only a few weeks ago, the sonogram of Jean’s womb
resembled nothing so much
as a satellite-map of Ireland;
now the image
is so well-defined we can make out not only a hand
but a thumb;
on the road to Spiddal, a woman hitching a ride;
a gladiator in his net, passing judgement on the crowd.<
br />
Footling
This I don’t believe: rather than take a header
off the groyne
and into the ground-swell,
yea verily, the ground-swell of life,
she shows instead her utter
disregard – part diffidence, but mostly scorn –
for what lies behind the great sea-wall
and what knocks away at the great sea-cliff;
though she’s been in training all spring and summer
and swathed herself in fat
and Saran-
Wrap like an old-time Channel swimmer,
she’s now got cold feet
and turned in on herself, the phantom ‘a’ in Cesarian
The Birth
Seven o’clock. The seventh day of the seventh month of the year.
No sooner have I got myself up in lime-green scrubs,
a sterile cap and mask,
and taken my place at the head of the table
than the windlass-women ply their shears
and gralloch-grub
for a footling foot, then, warming to their task,
haul into the inestimable
realm of apple-blossoms and chanterelles and damsons and eel-spears
and foxes and the general hubbub
of inkies and jennets and Kickapoos with their lemniscs
or peekaboo-quiffs of Russian sable
and tallow-unctuous vernix, into the realm of the widgeon –
the ‘whew’ or ‘yellow-poll’, not the ‘zuizin’ –
Dorothy Aoife Korelitz Muldoon: I watch through floods of tears
as they give her a quick rub-a-dub
and whisk
her off to the nursery, then check their staple-guns for staples.
Incantata
In memory of Mary Farl Powers
I thought of you tonight, a leanbh, lying there in your long barrow
colder and dumber than a fish by Francisco de Herrera,
as I X-Actoed from a spud the Inca
glyph for a mouth: thought of that first time I saw your pink
spotted torso, distant-near as a nautilus,
when you undid your portfolio, yes indeedy,
and held the print of what looked like a cankered potato
at arm’s length – your arms being longer, it seemed, than Lugh’s.
Even Lugh of the Long (sometimes the Silver) Arm
would have wanted some distance between himself and the army-worms
that so clouded the sky over St Cloud you’d have to seal
the doors and windows and steel
yourself against their nightmarish déjeuner sur l’herbe:
