Selected Poems (1968-2014)

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: