by Paul Muldoon
It’s true they’ve yet to develop the turnip clamp
and the sword with a weighted pommel
but the Danes are already dyeing everything beige.
In anticipation, perhaps, of the carpet and mustard factories
built on ground first broken by the Brigantes.
The Benedictines still love a bit of banter
along with the Beatitudes. Blessed is the trundle bed,
it readies us for the tunnel
from Spital Tongues to the staithes. I’m at once full of dread
and in complete denial.
I cannot thole the thought of Seamus Heaney dead.
In the way that 9 and 3 are a perfect match
an Irish war band has 27 members.
In Barrow-in-Furness a shipyard man scans a wall for a striking wrench
as a child might mooch
for blackberries in a ditch. In times to come the hydrangea
will mark most edges of empire.
For the moment I’m hemmed in every bit as much
by sorrow as by the crush of cattle
along the back roads from Durham to Desertmartin.
Diseart meaning ‘a hermitage’.
In Ballynahone Bog they’re piling still more turf in a cart.
It seems one manifestation of the midge
may have no mouthparts.
Heartsore yet oddly heartened,
I’ve watched these six otters make their regal
progress across the threshold. I see how they might balk
at their burden. A striped sail
will often take years to make. They wear wolf or bear pelts,
the berserkers. Like the Oracle
at Delphi, whose three-legged stool
straddles a fiery trough
amid the still-fuming heaps of slag,
they’re almost certainly on drugs. Perhaps a Viking sail handler,
himself threatened with being overwhelmed,
will have gone out on a limb and invented a wind tiller
by lashing a vane to the helm?
That a longship has been overturned on the moor
is as much as we may surmise
of a beehive cell thrown up along the Tyne.
The wax moth lives in a beehive proper. It can detect sound
frequencies up to 300 kHz. The horse in the stable
may be trained to follow a scent.
What looks like a growth of stubble
has to do with the chin drying out. I straighten my
black tie as the pallbearer
who almost certainly filched
that strip of skin draws level with me. Did I say ‘calamine’?
I meant ‘camomile’. For the tearoom nearest to Grizedale Tarn
it’s best to follow the peat stain
of Grizedale Beck. A prototype of backgammon
was played by the Danes. Even Mozart would resort to a recitative
for moving things along. Halfway through what’s dissolved into the village
of Bellaghy, this otter steps out from under the bier
and offers me his spot. It seems even an otter may subordinate
himself whilst being first in line to revolt.
He may be at once complete insider and odd man out.
Columbanus is said to have tamed a bear
and harnessed it to a plough. Bach. The sarabande.
Under the floor of Cuthbert’s cell they’ve buried the skull of a colt
born with a curvature of the spine.
Even now we throw down a challenge like a keel
whilst refraining from eating peach pits for fear of cyanide.
Refrain as in frenum, ‘a bridle’.
We notice how a hook on the hindwing of a moth
connects it to an eye on the forewing. A complex joint
if ever there was one. According to our tanners,
the preservation of hides involves throwing caution
to the wind. Their work permits
allowed Vikings to sack Armagh in 832. The orange
twine helps us keep things straight. I once sustained concussion,
having been hit by a boom in Greenwich,
and saw three interlocking red triangles on my beer mat.
The way to preserve a hide is not by working into it Irish moss or casein
but the very brains
of the very beast that was erstwhile so comfortable in its skin.
Irish monasticism may well derive from Egypt.
We don’t discount the doings of the Desert Fox
any more than Lily Langtry’s shenanigans with Prince
Louis of Battenberg. The 1920s vogue for sequins
began with Tutankhamen. Five wise virgins
are no more likely than five foolish
to trim a fish-oil lamp to illumine
the process of Benedictine nuns spinning and weaving yarns.
I don’t suppose we’ll ever get to grips with the bane
of so many scholars–the word SINIMIAINIAIS
inscribed on a Viking sword. As for actually learning to grieve,
it seems to be a nonstarter. The floor of Cuthbert’s cell is flush
with the floor of Ballynahone Bog after the first autumn rains,
the gantries, the Woodbines, the drop scones,
the overflowing basin’s chipped
enamel, the earth’s old ointment box, the collop of lox,
the drumroll of wrens
at which we still tend to look askance.
This style of nasal helmet was developed by the Phrygians
while they were stationed at Castledawson.
The barrow at Belas Knap was built before the pyramids.
Same thing with Newgrange.
The original seven-branched menorah’s based on a design
by Moses himself. When it comes to the crunch
we can always fall back on potassium bromide
as an anticonvulsant. A camomile tisane
in a tearoom near the Bigrigg iron mine.
Since the best swords are still made from imported steel,
the more literal among us can’t abide
the thought an island may be tidal.
This is the same Cuthbert whose chalice cloth
will be carried into battle on the point
of a spear. I can just about visualize a banner
of half-digested fish fluttering through the air
from the otter spraint
piled high at the threshold of Cuthbert’s dry stone holt.
A sea trout is, after all, merely a brown trout
with wanderlust. It wears a tonsure from ear to ear
like any Irish aspirant.
We’ll still use the term ‘smolt’
of a salmon that first leaves fresh water for salt. Vikings will fletch
their arrows with goose long into the era of Suleiman
the Magnificent. A tithe barn
often cedes another tenth of its grain.
We won’t have been the first to examine
our consciences at Bishop’s Cleeve.
Benedictine monks will extend their tradition of persiflage
far beyond the confines
of Northumbria. Long after the Synod
of Whitby has determined the penis bone of an otter may double
as a tiepin. A grave’s best filled with Lough Neagh sand.
We use a guideline when we dibble
cauliflower plants so things won’t go awry.
A calcium carbide ‘gun’ still does duty as a pigeon-scarer
in the parish of Banagher, a parish where a stag
has been known to carry in its antlers
a missal, a missal from which a saint might pronounce.
Let’s not confuse candelabras with chandeliers.
I’d as lief an ounce
of prevention as a pound of cure,
particularly when it comes to the demise
of a great skald. Coffin is to truckle
as salmon is to catafalque.
Could it be that both the trousers and the coat of mail
were invented by the Celts?
It’s no time since Antrim and Argyll
were under Áedán mac Gabráin’s rule.
We come together again in the hope of staving off
our pangs of grief. An altar cloth carried into battle
by the 82nd Airborne. A carton
of Lucky Strikes clutched by a GI on the bridge
at Toome. I want to step in to play my part
while the sky above the hermitage
does a flip chart.
Grey, blue, grey, blue, grey. However spartan
his beehive hut, Cuthbert has developed a niche
market in fur, honey, amber,
and the sweet wine we’ll come to know as Rhenish.
Sometimes it takes only a nudge
to start a longship down a trench.
In 832, by most tallies, the Vikings did a number
on Armagh not once but thrice. I want that coffin to cut a notch
in my clavicle. Be they ‘lace curtain’ or ‘shanty’,
Irish Americans still hold a dirge chanter
in the highest esteem. That, and to stand in an otter’s stead.
The chiastic structure of the book of Daniel
mimics a double axe-head.
As with the stubble, so with the finger- and toenails.
I cannot thole the thought of Seamus Heaney dead.
In South Derry as in the coalfields of South Shields
a salmon has been known to dance along a chariot pole.
In the way we swap ‘scuttle’ for ‘scupper’
we’re flummoxed as much by the insidiousness of firedamp
as our sneaking regard for Rommel.
I think of an otter cortege
passing under a colonnade of fig trees
barren despite their show of foliage.
We know neither the day nor the hour of our summons.
The same Cuthbert of Lindisfarne
whose body will be carried aloft by monks fleeing those same Danes.
Mountbatten of Burma. Montgomery of Alamein.
All with the same insignia on their scale-armoured sleeves.
Refulgent all. From fulgere, ‘to flash’.
Pelt
Now rain rattled
the roof of my car
like holy water
on a coffin lid,
holy water and mud
landing with a thud
though as I listened
the uproar
faded to the stoniest
of silences … They piled
it on all day
till I gave way
to a contentment
I’d not felt in years,
not since that winter
I’d worn the world
against my skin,
worn it fur side in.
Saffron
Sometimes I’d happen on Alexander and Cleopatra
and several of their collaborators
tucking into a paella
tinged with saffron, saffron thought to be a cure
for scabies, bloody scours,
fires in the belly,
skin cancer, the ancient pestilence of Sumer,
not to speak of Alzheimer’s
and plain old melancholy.
I’m pretty sure things first
started to look bleak in 1987 at the University
of East Anglia
where I was introduced to the art of the lament
by Ezekiel. His electric fire’s single element
was an orange ice lolly.
He made me think I might lose my spot
as number one hod carrier in Mesopotamia,
a role that came quite easily
now I lived in a ziggurat
overlooking a man-made lake and sipped sugared
water with a swarm of honeybees.
Though A Flock of Seagulls
were scheduled to play the Union, there had been an icicle
in my heart since Anubis,
half-man, half-jackal,
had palmed me off on Ezekiel
for ritual embalmment.
He claimed A Flock of Seagulls were a one-hit wonder,
desert flowers left high and dry
on the polder. Anubis refused to implement
the Anglo-Irish Agreement.
He also told me the church clock in Crimond
had sixty-one minutes
to the hour. Ezekiel, meanwhile, was convinced
that creative writing, still in its infancy,
would amount
to a bona fide
academic pursuit only if students weren’t spoon-fed
but came to think of literature
as magical rather than magisterial.
Saffron itself was derived from the three stigma-tufts of a sterile
crocus that, ground, were often adulterated
with turmeric. An icicle was formed
precisely because it would repeatedly warm
to the idea of camaraderie,
then repeatedly give in to chilliness.
I took comfort from the insistence of the anchoress, Julian,
on the utter
necessity of sin for self-knowledge, a theory I’d have to tout
to the Hare Krishna devotees
who’d sworn off sex outside procreation in marriage.
Sometimes I’d see one, late at night, in saffron robe and topknot,
stranded at a bus stop
on the outskirts of Norwich.
Cuba (2)
I’m hanging with my daughter in downtown Havana.
She’s worried people think she’s my mail-order bride.
It might be the Anseo tattooed on her ankle.
It might be the tie-in with that poem of mine.
The ’59 Buicks. The ’59 Chevys.
The ’59 Studebakers with their whitewalled wheels.
The rain-bleached streets have been put through a mangle.
The sugar mills, too, are feeling the squeeze.
We touch on how Ireland will be inundated
long before the nil-nil draw.
Che Guevara’s father was one of the Galway Lynches.
Now a genetically engineered catfish can crawl
on its belly like an old-school guerrilla.
Maybe a diminished seventh isn’t the note
a half-decent revolution should end on?
The poor with their hands out for ‘pencils’ and ‘soap’?
Hopped up though I am on caffeine
I’ve suffered all my life from post-traumatic fatigue.
Even a world-class sleeper like Rip Van Winkle
was out of it for only twenty years.
A fillet of the fenny
cobra may yet fold into a blood-pressure drug.
A passion for marijuana
may yet be nipped in the bud.
Some are here for a nose job. Some a torn meniscus.
The profits from health tourism have been salted away.
The blue scorpion takes the sting from one cancer.
Ovarian may yet leave us unfazed.
Hemingway’s sun hat is woven from raffia.
He’s tried everything to stop the rot.
He’s cut everything back to the bare essentials.
His ’55 Chrysler’s in the shop.
We’ll sit with Hemingway through yet another evening
of trying to stay off the rum.
I’m running down the list of my uncles.
It was Uncle Pat who was marked by a gun.
Our friends Meyer Lansky and the Jewish mafia
built the Riviera as a gambling club.
Had it not been for the time differential
Uncle Arnie might have taken a cut.
The best baseball bats a
re turned from hibiscus.
They’re good against people who get in your way.
The best poems, meanwhile, give the answers
to questions only they have raised.
We touch on Bulat and Yevgeny,
two Russian friends who’ve since left town.
The Cuban ground iguana
is actually quite thin on the ground.
The cigars we lit up on Presidents’ Avenue
have won gold medals in the cigar games.
Now it seems a cigar may twinkle
all the more as the light fails.
My daughter’s led me through Hemingway’s villa
to a desk round which dusk-drinkers crowd.
She insists the Anseo on her Achilles tendon
represents her being in the here and now.
The cattle egret is especially elated
that a plough may still be yoked to an ox.
Others sigh for the era of three-martini lunches
and the Martini–Henry single-shot.
When will we give Rothstein and Lansky and their heavies
the collective heave?
In Ireland we need to start now to untangle
the rhetoric of 2016.
The Riviera’s pool is shaped like a coffin.
So much has been submerged here since the Bay of Pigs.
Maybe that’s why the buildings are wrinkled?
Maybe that’s why the cars have fins?
Dirty Data
The bog is fenced up there on Slieve Gullion, Slieve Gullion where the bracken leaf
still lies behind the Celto-Iberian sword design
adopted by the Romans. Pontius Pilate’s poised with his handkerchief
at the parting spine
where the contestants snort and stamp.
That’s right, Lew, the dealing
men from Crossmaglen put whiskey in our piñon tea. A hurricane lamp
shines from a shieling
like an undercover star. The goshawk nests in lodgepole and ponderosa pine
while a Mescalero girl twists
osiers into a basket that does indeed imitate
what passes for life, given how ring wants nothing more than to intertwine
with ring. The mountain’s covered in heavy schists.
The streams themselves are muddied.
The dog is tense. The dog is tense the day Ben Hourihane
falls fuel of the new Roman turbine,
Little Miss Sally hisself, tense enough to set off a chain
of events that will see Ben mine
warehouse after warehouse of schlock
and link him via a Roman warship
to a hell-for-leather chariot race at Antioch.
Sooner or later Messala will need a lot more than a double hip
replacement while Ben will barely chafe
at the bit. That’s right, Messala, an amputation saw!
