Selected Poems (1968-2014)

by Paul Muldoon

try as you might to run a foil

  across their tracks, it was to no avail;

  the army-worms shinnied down the stove-pipe on an army-worm rope.

  I can hardly believe that, when we met, my idea of ‘R and R’

  was to get smashed, almost every night, on sickly-sweet Demerara

  rum and Coke: as well as leaving you a grass widow

  (remember how Krapp looks up ‘viduity’?),

  after eight or ten or twelve of those dark rums

  it might be eight or ten or twelve o’clock before I’d land

  back home in Landseer Street, deaf and blind

  to the fact that not only was I all at sea, but in the doldrums.

  Again and again you’d hold forth on your own version of Thomism,

  your own Summa

  Theologiae that in everything there is an order,

  that the things of the world sing out in a great oratorio:

  it was Thomism, though, tempered by La Nausée,

  by His Nibs Sam Bethicket,

  and by that Dublin thing, that an artist must walk down Baggott

  Street wearing a hair-shirt under the shirt of Nessus.

  ‘D’éirigh me ar maidin,’ I sang, ‘a tharraingt chun aoinigh mhóir’:

  our first night, you just had to let slip that your secret amour

  for a friend of mine was such

  that you’d ended up lying with him in a ditch

  under a bit of whin, or gorse, or furze,

  somewhere on the border of Leitrim, perhaps, or Roscommon:

  ‘gamine’, I wanted to say, ‘kimono’;

  even then it was clear I’d never be at the centre of your universe.

  Nor should I have been, since you were there already, your own Ding

  an sich, no less likely to take wing

  than the Christ you drew for a Christmas card as a pupa

  in swaddling clothes: and how resolutely you would pooh pooh

  the idea I shared with Vladimir and Estragon,

  with whom I’d been having a couple of jars,

  that this image of the Christ-child swaddled and laid in the manger

  could be traced directly to those army-worm dragoons.

  I thought of the night Vladimir was explaining to all and sundry

  the difference between geantrai and suantrai

  and you remarked on how you used to have a crush

  on Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry, and Vladimir went to brush

  the ash off his sleeve with a legerdemain

  that meant only one thing – ‘Why does he put up with this crap?’ –

  and you weighed in with ‘To live in a dustbin, eating scrap,

  seemed to Nagg and Nell a most eminent domain.’

  How little you were exercised by those tiresome literary intrigues,

  how you urged me to have no more truck

  than the Thane of Calder

  with a fourth estate that professes itself to be ‘égalitaire’

  but wants only blood on the sand: yet, irony of ironies,

  you were the one who, in the end,

  got yourself up as a retiarius and, armed with net and trident,

  marched from Mount Street to the Merrion Square arena.

  In the end, you were the one who went forth to beard the lion,

  you who took the DART line

  every day from Jane’s flat in Dun Laoghaire, or Dalkey,

  dreaming your dream that the subterranean Dodder and Tolka

  might again be heard above the hoi polloi

  for whom Irish ‘art’ means a High Cross at Carndonagh or Corofin

  and The Book of Kells: not until the lion cried craven

  would the poor Tolka and the poor Dodder again sing out for joy.

  I saw you again tonight, in your jump-suit, thin as a rake,

  your hand moving in such a deliberate arc

  as you ground a lithographic stone

  that your hand and the stone blurred to one

  and your face blurred into the face of your mother, Betty Wahl,

  who took your failing, ink-stained hand

  in her failing, ink-stained hand

  and together you ground down that stone by sheer force of will.

  I remember your pooh poohing, as we sat there on the ‘Enterprise’,

  my theory that if your name is Powers

  you grow into it or, at least,

  are less inclined to tremble before the likes of this bomb-blast

  further up the track: I myself was shaking like a leaf

  as we wondered whether the IRA or the Red

  Hand Commandos or even the Red

  Brigades had brought us to a standstill worthy of Hamm and Clov.

  Hamm and Clov; Nagg and Nell; Watt and Knott;

  the fact is that we’d been at a standstill long before the night

  things came to a head,

  long before we’d sat for half the day in the sweltering heat

  somewhere just south of Killnasaggart

  and I let slip a name – her name – off my tongue

  and you turned away (I see it now) the better to deliver the sting

  in your own tail, to let slip your own little secret.

  I thought of you again tonight, thin as a rake, as you bent

  over the copper plate of ‘Emblements’,

  its tidal wave of army-worms into which you all but disappeared:

  I wanted to catch something of its spirit

  and yours, to body out your disembodied vox

  clamantis in deserto, to let this all-too-cumbersome device

  of a potato-mouth in a potato-face

  speak out, unencumbered, from its long, low, mould-filled box.

  I wanted it to speak to what seems always true of the truly great,

  that you had a winningly inaccurate

  sense of your own worth, that you would second-guess

  yourself too readily by far, that you would rally to any cause

  before your own, mine even,

  though you detected in me a tendency to put

  on too much artificiality, both as man and poet,

  which is why you called me ‘Polyester’ or ‘Polyurethane’.

  That last time in Dublin, I copied with a quill dipped in oak-gall

  onto a sheet of vellum, or maybe a human caul,

  a poem for The Great Book of Ireland: as I watched the low

  swoop over the lawn today of a swallow

  I thought of your animated talk of Camille Pissarro

  and André Derain’s The Turning Road, L’Estaque:

  when I saw in that swallow’s nest a face in a mud-pack

  from that muddy road I was filled again with a profound sorrow.

  You must have known already, as we moved from the ‘Hurly Burly’

  to McDaid’s or Riley’s,

  that something was amiss: I think you even mentioned a homeopath

  as you showed off the great new acid-bath

  in the Graphic Studio, and again undid your portfolio

  to lay out your latest works; I try to imagine the strain

  you must have been under, pretending to be as right as rain

  while hearing the bells of a church from some long-flooded valley.

  From the Quabbin reservoir, maybe, where the banks and bakeries

  of a dozen little submerged Pompeii reliquaries

  still do a roaring trade: as clearly as I saw your death-mask

  in that swallow’s nest, you must have heard the music

  rise from the muddy ground between

  your breasts as a nocturne, maybe, by John Field;

  to think that you thought yourself so invulnerable, so inviolate,

  that a little cancer could be beaten.

  You must have known, as we walked through the ankle-deep clabber

  with Katherine and Jean and the long-winded Quintus Calaber,

  that cancer had already made such a breach
<
br />   that you would almost surely perish:

  you must have thought, as we walked through the woods

  along the edge of the Quabbin,

  that rather than let some doctor cut you open

  you’d rely on infusions of hardock, hemlock, all the idle weeds.

  I thought again of how art may be made, as it was by André Derain,

  of nothing more than a turn

  in the road where a swallow dips into the mire

  or plucks a strand of bloody wool from a strand of barbed wire

  in the aftermath of Chickamauga or Culloden

  and builds from pain, from misery, from a deep-seated hurt,

  a monument to the human heart

  that shines like a golden dome among roofs rain-glazed and leaden.

  I wanted the mouth in this potato-cut

  to be heard far beyond the leaden, rain-glazed roofs of Quito,

  to be heard all the way from the southern hemisphere

  to Clontarf or Clondalkin, to wherever your sweet-severe

  spirit might still find a toe-hold

  in this world: it struck me then how you would be aghast

  at the thought of my thinking you were some kind of ghost

  who might still roam the earth in search of an earthly delight.

  You’d be aghast at the idea of your spirit hanging over this vale

  of tears like a jump-suited jump-jet whose vapour-trail

  unravels a sky: for there’s nothing, you’d say, nothing over

  and above the sky itself, nothing but cloud-cover

  reflected in a thousand lakes; it seems that Minne-

  sota itself means ‘sky-tinted water’, that the sky is a great slab

  of granite or iron ore that might at any moment slip

  back into the worked-out sky-quarry, into the worked-out sky-mines.

  To use the word ‘might’ is to betray you once too often, to betray

  your notion that nothing’s random, nothing arbitrary:

  the gelignite weeps, the hands fly by on the alarm clock,

  the ‘Enterprise’ goes clackety-clack

  as they all must; even the car hijacked that morning in the Cross,

  that was preordained, its owner spread on the bonnet

  before being gagged and bound or bound

  and gagged, that was fixed like the stars in the Southern Cross.

  The fact that you were determined to cut yourself off in your prime

  because it was pre-determined has my eyes abrim:

  I crouch with Belacqua

  and Lucky and Pozzo in the Acacacac-

  ademy of Anthropopopometry, trying to make sense of the ‘quaquaqua’

  of that potato-mouth; that mouth as prim

  and proper as it’s full of self-opprobrium,

  with its ‘quaquaqua’, with its ‘Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq’.

  That’s all that’s left of the voice of Enrico Caruso

  from all that’s left of an opera-house somewhere in Matto Grosso,

  all that’s left of the hogweed and horehound and cuckoo-pint,

  of the eighteen soldiers dead at Warrenpoint,

  of the Black Church clique and the Graphic Studio claque,

  of the many moons of glasses on a tray,

  of the brewery-carts drawn by moon-booted drays,

  of those jump-suits worn under your bottle-green worsted cloak.

  Of the great big dishes of chicken lo mein and beef chow mein,

  of what’s mine is yours and what’s yours mine,

  of the oxlips and cowslips

  on the banks of the Liffey at Leixlip

  where the salmon breaks through the either/or neither/nor nether

  reaches despite the temple-veil

  of itself being rent and the penny left out overnight on the rail

  is a sheet of copper when the mail-train has passed over.

  Of the bride carried over the threshold, hey, only to alight

  on the limestone slab of another threshold,

  of the swarm, the cast,

  the colt, the spew of bees hanging like a bottle of Lucozade

  from a branch the groom must sever,

  of Emily Post’s ruling, in Etiquette,

  on how best to deal with the butler being in cahoots

  with the cook when they’re both in cahoots with the chauffeur.

  Of that poplar-flanked stretch of road between Leiden

  and The Hague, of the road between Rathmullen and Ramelton,

  where we looked so long and hard

  for some trace of Spinoza or Amelia Earhart,

  both of them going down with their engines on fire:

  of the stretch of road somewhere near Urney

  where Orpheus was again overwhelmed by that urge to turn

  back and lost not only Eurydice but his steel-strung lyre.

  Of the sparrows and finches in their bell of suet,

  of the bitter-sweet

  bottle of Calvados we felt obliged to open

  somewhere near Falaise, so as to toast our new-found copains,

  of the priest of the parish

  who came enquiring about our ‘status’, of the hedge-clippers

  I somehow had to hand, of him running like the clappers

  up Landseer Street, of my subsequent self-reproach.

  Of the remnants of Airey Neave, of the remnants of Mountbatten,

  of the famous andouilles, of the famous boudins

  noirs et blancs, of the barrel-vault

  of the cathedral at Rouen, of the flashlight, fat and roll of felt

  on each of their sledges, of the music

  of Joseph Beuys’s pack of huskies, of that baldy little bugger

  mushing them all the way from Berncastel through Bacarrat

  to Belfast, his head stuck with honey and gold-leaf like a mosque.

  Of Benjamin Britten’s Lachrymae, with its gut-wrenching viola,

  of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, of Frankie Valli’s,

  of Braque’s great painting The Shower of Rain,

  of the fizzy, lemon or sherbet-green Ranus ranus

  plonked down in Trinity like a little Naugahyde pouffe,

  of eighteen soldiers dead in Oriel,

  of the weakness for a little fol-de-rol-de-rolly

  suggested by the gap between the front teeth of the Wife of Bath.

  Of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, of Seurat’s

  piling of tesserae upon tesserae

  to give us a monkey arching its back

  and the smoke arching out from a smoke-stack,

  of Sunday afternoons in the Botanic Gardens, going with the flow

  of the burghers of Sandy Row and Donegal

  Pass and Andersonstown and Rathcoole,

  of the army Land Rover flaunt-flouncing by with its heavy furbelow.

  Of Marlborough Park, of Notting Hill, of the Fitzroy Avenue

  immortalized by Van ‘His real name’s Ivan’

  Morrison, ‘and him the dead spit

  of Padraic Fiacc’, of John Hewitt, the famous expat,

  in whose memory they offer every year six of their best milch cows,

  of the Bard of Ballymacarrett,

  of every ungodly poet in his or her godly garret,

  of Medhbh and Michael and Frank and Ciaran and ‘wee’ John Qughes.

  Of the Belfast school, so called, of the school of hard knocks,

  of your fervent eschewal of stockings and socks

  as you set out to hunt down your foes

  as implacably as the tóraidheacht through the Fews

  of Redmond O’Hanlon, of how that ‘d’ and that ‘c’ aspirate

  in tóraidheacht make it sound like a last gasp in an oxygen-tent,

  of your refusal to open a vent

  but to breathe in spirit of salt, the mordant salt-spirit.

  Of how mordantly hydrochloric acid must have scored and scarred,

 
of the claim that boiled skirrets

  can cure the spitting of blood, of that dank

  flat somewhere off Morehampton Road, of the unbelievable stink

  of valerian or feverfew simmering over a low heat,

  of your sitting there, pale and gaunt,

  with that great prescriber of boiled skirrets, Dr John Arbuthnot,

  your face in a bowl of feverfew, a towel over your head.

  Of the great roll of paper like a bolt of cloth

  running out again and again like a road at the edge of a cliff,

  of how you called a Red Admiral a Red

  Admirable, of how you were never in the red

  on either the first or the last

  of the month, of your habit of loosing the drawstring of your purse

  and finding one scrunched-up, obstreperous

  note and smoothing it out and holding it up, pristine and pellucid.

  Of how you spent your whole life with your back to the wall,

  of your generosity when all the while

  you yourself lived from hand

  to mouth, of Joseph Beuys’s pack of hounds

  crying out from their felt and fat ‘Atone, atone, atone’,

  of Watt remembering the ‘Krak! Krek! Krik!’

  of those three frogs’ karaoke

  like the still, sad basso continuo of the great quotidian.

  Of a ground bass of sadness, yes, but also a sennet of hautboys

  as the fat and felt hounds of Beuys O’Beuys

  bayed at the moon over a caravan

  in Dunmore East, I’m pretty sure it was, or Dungarvan:

  of my guest appearance in your self-portrait not as a hidalgo

  from a long line

  of hidalgos but a hound-dog, a leanbh,

  a dog that skulks in the background, a dog that skulks and stalks.

  Of that self-portrait, of the self-portraits by Rembrandt van Rijn,

  of all that’s revelation, all that’s rune,

  of all that’s composed, all composed of odds and ends,

  of that daft urge to make amends

  when it’s far too late, too late even to make sense of the clutter

  of false trails and reversed horseshoe tracks

  and the aniseed we took it in turn to drag

  across each other’s scents, when only a fish is dumber and colder.

  Of your avoidance of canned goods, in the main,

  on account of the exceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedingly high risk of ptomaine,

  of corned beef in particular being full of crap,

  of your delight, so, in eating a banana as ceremoniously as Krapp

  but flinging the skin over your shoulder like a thrush

  flinging off a shell from which it’s only just managed to disinter

  a snail, like a stone-faced, twelfth-century