Selected Poems (1968-2014)

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!