by Paul Muldoon
of being stripped
of their command of the vortex
while having lost
their common touch, they’ve been so long
above it all.
Medley for Morin Khur
I
The sound box is made of a horse’s head.
The resonator is horse skin.
The strings and bow are of horsehair.
II
The morin khur is the thoroughbred
of Mongolian violins.
Its call is the call of the stallion to the mare.
III
A call which may no more be gainsaid
than that of jinn to jinn
through jasmine-weighted air.
IV
A call that may no more be gainsaid
than that of blood kin to kin
through a body-strewn central square.
V
A square in which they’ll heap the horses’ heads
by the heaps of horse skin
and the heaps of horsehair.
from MAGGOT
A Hare at Aldergrove
A hare standing up at last on his own two feet
in the blasted grass by the runway may trace his lineage to the great
assembly of hares that, in the face of what might well have looked like defeat,
would, in 1963 or so, migrate
here from the abandoned airfield at Nutt’s Corner, not long after Marilyn Monroe
overflowed from her body stocking
in Something’s Got to Give. These hares have themselves so long been given to row
against the flood that when a King
of the Hares has tried to ban bare knuckle fighting, so wont
are they to grumble and gripe
about what will be acceptable and what won’t
they’ve barely noticed that the time is ripe
for them to shake off the din
of a pack of hounds that has caught their scent
and take in that enormity just as I’ve taken in
how my own DNA is 87 % European and East Asian 13 %.
So accustomed had they now grown
to a low-level human hum that, despite the almost weekly atrocity
in which they’d lost one of their own
to a wheeled blade, they followed the herd towards this eternal city
as if they’d had a collective change of heart.
My own heart swells now as I watch him nibble on a shoot
of blaeberry or heather while smoothing out a chart
by which he might divine if our Newark-bound 757 will one day overshoot
the runway about which there so often swirled
rumours of Messerschmitts.
Clapper-lugged, cleft-lipped, he looks for all the world
as if he might never again put up his mitts
despite the fact that he shares a Y chromosome
with Niall of the Nine Hostages,
never again allow his om
to widen and deepen by such easy stages,
never relaunch his campaign as melanoma has relaunched its campaign
in a friend I once dated,
her pain rising above the collective pain
with which we’ve been inundated
as this one or that has launched an attack
to the slogan of ‘Brits Out’ or ‘Not an Inch’
or a dull ack-ack
starting up in the vicinity of Ballynahinch,
looking for all the world as if he might never again get into a fluster
over his own entrails,
never again meet lustre with lustre
in the eye of my dying friend, never establish what truly ails
another woman with a flesh wound
found limping where a hare has only just been shot, never again bewitch
the milk in the churn, never swoon as we swooned
when Marilyn’s white halter-top dress blew up in The Seven Year Itch,
in a flap now only as to whether
we should continue to tough it out till
something better comes along or settle for this salad of blaeberry and heather
and a hint of common tormentil.
Lateral
In the province of Gallia Narbonensis and the region of Nemausus there is a marsh called Latera where dolphins and men co-operate to catch fish.
– PLINY THE ELDER, Natural History
In spite of a dolphin wearing through, every two hours, his outer layer
of conveyor-belt polymer, in spite of the spill of venom
by which his affiliates used to lure
mullet into their nets having taken its course
through his veins, he simply won’t hear of how his affiliates outsource
their dirty work to another ring of the plenum.
Even the blue heron may backpedal
as he pins a medal
to his uniformed chest while vaunting cutoff denims,
yet a dolphin won’t rethink his having left it to men
to send mixed signals to the mullahs they processed in some holding pen.
Quail
Forty years in the wilderness
of Antrim and Fermanagh
where the rime would deliquesce
like tamarisk-borne manna
and the small-shot of hail
was de-somethinged. Defrosted.
This is to say nothing of the flocks of quail
now completely exhausted
from having so long entertained an
inordinately soft spot for the hard man
like Redmond O’Hanlon or Roaring Hanna
who delivers himself up only under duress
after forty years in the wilderness
of Antrim and Fermanagh.
The Humours of Hakone
I
A corduroy road over a quag had kept me on the straight and narrow.
Now something was raising a stink.
A poem decomposing around what looked like an arrow.
Her stomach contents ink.
Too late to cast about for clues
either at the purikura, or ‘sticker-photo booth’, or back at the Pagoda.
Too late to establish by autolysis, not to speak of heat loss,
the precise time of death on the road to Edo.
Who knew ‘forensic’ derived from forum,
which senator’s sword sealed the deal?
All I had to go on was this clog she’d taken as her platform,
this straight and narrow hair, this panty-hose heel.
I thought of how I’d once been inclined to grub
through the acidic soil
for a panty-hose toe or some such scrap
of evidence. Whereas Mount Fuji had yet to come to a head like a boil
about to crown its career,
it was too late to extrapolate from the cooling rate of fat
in a mortuary drawer
the rate of cooling in a body that threw off merely this sticker photo.
II
It was now far too late to know if this was even the scene of the crime.
Too late to ascertain from the serial number of a breast implant
if this was the same girl I’d seen in the purikura near the tearoom
back in Kyoto. Too late to determine if a salivary gland
might have secreted its critical enzyme
or, as her belly resumed its verdure,
implored an eye to give up its vitreous potassium
as a nun from a mendicant order
might unthinkingly draw in her voluminous
yellow robe to implore one for a little buckwheat.
Too late to put one’s head into the noose
of the world as into the air pocket
of a capsized boat and swab the vitreous humour
off an eyeball. I’d read somewhere that the Japanese love of kitsch
is nowhere more
evident than in the craze for these sticker-photo booths which
go even further to reinforce
not only the heels of panty hose worn under a kimono
but the impression that phosphorus
might still be a common element in flash photography. Dead common.
III
Too late to determine how long the girl I’d also glimpsed at the hot spring
had been beleaguered by pupae.
By day four the skin would have peeled from her thigh like a fine-mesh stocking.
I thought of De Mundi Transitu. Columbanus at Bobbio.
I thought of how I’d planned not to keep my end of the bargain
I drew up over that little cup of char
back in the Kyoka Ryokan.
I’d promised then I would willingly abjure
my right to eat globefish later that night in Santora
and enjoy my own little brush
with death. Too late to determine in which mountain sanitaria
the lepers had in fact been held. Too late to ascertain if Roshi
belonged to the Tokugawa clan with their triple-hollyhock mon
and their boat laid up for winter in shrink-wrap.
Who knew that humus might lie beneath ‘humane’?
Too late to deduce if the father of this girl in her geisha robe
had met her mother on the main drag
of Waxahachie, Texas, while he worked on the Superconducting Super Collider.
Too late to scour the scene for a kimono swatch or a toe rag
to send back to the lab for a culture.
IV
It was far too late to have forsworn
my ambition to eat globefish in an attempt to buck this tiresome trend
towards peace and calm. Too late to establish if the shorn
head of a mendicant nun might send
a signal back to the father of the girl I glimpsed on the Tokaido line
who had himself worked on the antilock
braking system of the bullet train. Too late to find a chalk outline
never mind the metallic
smell of blood on the corduroy
road to Edo. Too late for this girl to release an endorphin
to allow her to brave the nishikigoi,
or ‘braided carp’, which might have been the only ones to raven
on her foot soles. At Ryoan-ji a monk must rake and re-rake
the gravel with a birch-wood tine
till it looks like a series of waves always just about to break.
Too late to examine the small intestine
never mind swab vitreous potassium off an eyeball.
Too late to take in firsthand
the impression left on a sticker-photo-booth wall
of that great world at which this one may merely hint. Merely hint.
V
Too late to luxuriate in an onsen, or ‘communal bath made of cypress’,
and ponder an Elastoplast
that must have covered some minor bruise
winking from the depths. Too late to send it back to the analyst
with a swatch of sackcloth
or a panty-hose shred or a straight hair from her braid.
Too late to don a latex glove
and examine the corduroy road with its maggot brood
that traces itself back to the days of the Tokugawa shogunate
when Mount Fuji itself was coming to a head.
Who knew the body is a footnote
to the loss of its own heat
and the gases released when it begins to disintegrate
underlie a protruding tongue?
Too late to retrieve from the onsen in the shape of a giant gourd
that smelled like a lab’s formaldehyde tank
her fancy-freighted skull that scarcely made a dent
in the pillow from which only buckwheat would now ever sprout.
Too late to divine from her stomach contents
the components of a metaphor that must now forever remain quite separate.
VI
It was far too late to reconstruct the train station bento box
she bought at Kyoto-eki the night before the night she took her vows
and threw up in the hollyhocks.
Too late to figure out if the Tokugawa clan would refuse
a plainclothes escort
to a less than fully fledged geisha.
Too late to insist that the body of a poem is no less sacred
than a temple with its banner gash
though both stink to high heaven.
Who knew that Budai is often confused with the Buddha?
Too late to divine
that what was now merely the air pocket of a capsized boat
had been a poem decomposing around a quill.
Too late to chart the flow
of purge fluid from a skull
that scarcely made a dent in the old buckwheat pillow
despite the metaphor that might have sustained her in her sorrow
as she, too, attempted to buck
this tiresome trend and alighted at the new station at Kazamatsuri
and felt, for the first time in years, the wind at her back.
VII
Whereas one might still try to reconcile the incorporeal
poem to the image of a fleshed-out Columbanus in a communal bath
his Regula Monachorum, or ‘Monastic Rule’,
hardly extended to the girl in the sticker-photo booth
who was yet to board the bullet train.
It was far too late to establish the interval
between her being so blissfully carefree and so balefully carrion.
Too late to deduce from the life cycle of a blowfly
a scenario that would not beggar
description less belief. Whereas I recognized the steel blue of one Musca
vomitoria, I couldn’t connect the girl from the purikura
with the steel-blue mask
her sticker photo showed the world. The blowflies so few and far between
their threat must have seemed thinly veiled
until it was far too late to separate kimono and patten
from the black-green purge fluid.
Too late for the Tokugawa clan to send a galloper
over the bony ridge
in her skull with his accurate-to-within-a-thousandth-of-an-inch calipers
to report back to Edo on this security breach.
VIII
It was far too late to determine if these humours had been dry or wet
now I’d forsworn laying myself open
to the globefish. Too late to dissuade
the girl in the purikura from risking the type of panty-hose heel known as ‘Cuban’
never mind warning her off a Hi-Chew flavoured with durian.
Far too late to inquire
why a poem had taken a wrong turn
on a corduroy road across a quaking mire
to have its own little meltdown.
I’d read somewhere that however advanced the art
of forensics has become, including the potassium analysis of the gelatin
in the vitreous humour, to fix the time of death is hard
if not hopeless. Waxahachie. Some propose the name means ‘fat wildcat’
while others persevere
in thinking ‘buffalo creek’ or even ‘buffalo chips’ just as good.
All I had to go on was the pouring of sulphur
over a clog print in snow, which seemed to highlight
that the poem began to self-digest
about the time I recognized that the sanitaria in which the lepers had been held
were nowhere in that great world of which this one is a sulphur cast.
IX
All I had to go on was the hunch that pupae would assail
the girl from the sticker-photo booth at the same rate as a poem cadaver.
Who knew
that lepis meant ‘fish scale’?
All I had to go on was that a globefish would have gained its livor
once it, too, was kitted out for the slab.
Whereas I’d read somewhere that the mean
annual temperature on Mount Fuji’s slopes
was –7 degrees centigrade, it was nonetheless too late to determine
if the humours of Hakone had been wet or dry.
Sanguine or phlegmatic. Choleric or melancholic.
In a drawer at the mortuary
a quail egg
from her railway-station bento
suggests the rate of cooling will vary by only a few degrees.
I’d read somewhere that the need for ID at the checkpoint
in Hakone started the sticker-photo craze
as far back as the Edo period. Along with the Japanese straight perm.
Who knew that geisha is often confused with geiko?
All I had to go on was a single maggot puparium
to help me substantiate the date of a corduroy road over a quag.
Loss of Separation: A Companion
In the province of Gallia Narbonensis and the region of Nemausus there is a marsh called Latera where dolphins and men co-operate to catch fish.
– PLINY THE ELDER, Natural History
I used to think that Mutual Aid
had given rise to the first kibbutzim.
Now an economic blockade
seems merely a victimless crime.
I used to think I’d got it right
when I notched up a ’59 Plymouth fin.
Now I fight only to fight
shy of the assembly line
where I’m waiting for some lover
to kick me out of bed
for having acted on a whim
after I’ve completely lost the thread
and find myself asking a river
to run that by me one more time.
from ONE THOUSAND THINGS WORTH KNOWING
Cuthbert and the Otters
In memory of Seamus Heaney
Notwithstanding the fact that one of them has gnawed a strip of flesh
from the shoulder of the salmon,
relieving it of a little darne,
the fish these six otters would fain
carry over the sandstone limen
and into Cuthbert’s cell, a fish garlanded with bay leaves
and laid out on a linden flitch
like a hauberked warrior laid out on his shield,
may yet be thought of as whole.
An entire fish for an abbot’s supper.
