One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (4 page)
Read One Thousand Things Worth Knowing Online
Authors: Paul Muldoon
lodging in the frontal bone,
whose braids have always been unclasped,
her hair
tri na cheile
like the mare's before a farrier
who is himself somewhat slipshod.
Little has looked more through-other
than the old lime pother
where two smiths go at it
hammer and tongs, two border terriers
with their many hoof-knives and rasps
scattered in the horse shit
while they try to wrangle the hoop
off a chariot wheel.
Until now, that is, when Cybele
opens fire on the bailey
where the Normans have learned to cant
the rim of that same wheel.
A young marsh-harrier
will go traipsing through air it's trod
because it's out of the loop,
only gradually learning to stoop
as a fully fledged hawk
attempting to break the sound barrier.
Those whose experience is scant
will most enjoy the chalk
downs and all such pleasant vistas
afforded by tunics,
by plackets or stomachers that seal
almost more than they reveal
when ripped open, by Jove â¦
As to which war, it was the Second Punic
where a spear carrier
who'd himself been given a prod
because he'd somehow just missed a
cue claimed four ballistas
set off the string quartet
in the spirit of “the more the merrier.”
It was those catapults that drove
Roman women to let
their hair grow right down to their waists
for twisting into skeins
and stretching our sense of the funic-
ular to modern Munich.
Some early fragmentation bombs
were the calcified brains
of Celtic warriors
(i.e., Mesgegra, Oh my God!),
against which combatants have faced
off and straightaway braced
themselves with the staunchness
of such practiced feinters and parriers
as two girls at a senior prom
who've worn the same slit dress.
ANONYMOUS: FROM ââMARBAN AND GUAIRE''
KING GUAIRE
My brother Marban, hermit monk,
why don't you sleep in a bed
instead of among pine trees, with only the forest floor
on which to lay your tonsured head?
MARBAN THE HERMIT
As it happens, I have a hut in the forest.
Its precise location
is known only to God, but I can report
that on one side an ash tree stands guard
while the other is barred
by a hazel such as you'd find at a ringfort.
Heather stands in for its doorposts
and fragrant honeysuckle
binds its lintel fast.
For the benefit of the pigs
beech trees let fall beech twigs
and pig-fattening mast.
The dimensions of my hutâ
small but not
too
smallâ
make it easy enough to defend.
A woman in the guise of a blackbird
spreads the word
from its gable end.
The great stags of Drum Rolach
start up from a stream that runs
across a mud shelf.
From there you may make out
clay-red Roigne, Mucruime and, no doubt,
the plain of Moenmag itself.
Won't you come for a tour
of my wooded realm
with its paths only wild beasts beat?
Though I know
you have much more to show,
my life is quite replete.
Think of the shaggy limbs
of a yew tree
saying its sooth.
Think of a massive oak
spreading a green cloak
by way of a summer booth.
You may ponder a huge apple tree such
as you'd find at another ringfort.
A tree bestowing many gifts.
When it comes to nuts,
the hazel trees by my hut
never give short shrift.
There are the best of wells
and lovely waterfalls
over which to gush.
The medicinal yew
and hackberry on which to chew
are nowhere more lush.
In the vicinity are goats,
stags, and hinds,
pigs that are the next best thing to pets,
and wild pigs lurking in the scrub,
the badger sow and her cubs
in their sett.
In front of my establishment
a great host of the countryside peaceably assembles.
They gather. They gather and fold.
Meanwhile the dog-fox
picking its way through the wood in long socks
is lovely to behold.
In the face of the quickly prepared repasts
on offer in my house
I couldn't be more devout.
The water's superb,
as are the perennial herbs
that accompany salmon and trout.
The rowan or mountain ash.
The blackthorn and the sloes
within its scope.
Acorns in an acorn heap.
A bunch of bare berry-sheep
dangling from bare mountain slopes.
A handful of eggs,
honey, more beech mast, heath pease
God's sent my way.
There are even more apples to prog,
cranberries from the bog,
and berries known as whortle-, bil-, or blae-.
Beer flavored with bog myrtle.
A bed of strawberries the only bed
from which joy is evinced.
Hawthorn good for a pain in the heart.
Yew for giving it a start.
Blackthorn tea for a medicinal rinse.
How lovely then to quaff a cup
of hazel mead
from the very freshest batch.
To nibble at more acorns
and blackberries among the flailing thorns
of the bramble patch.
In next to no time summer has come round
with its dense ground cover
and all it bespeaks.
The tastes of wild marjoram
and, near the pond dam,
blood-cleansing wild leeks.
Bright-breasted wood pigeons
will be billing and cooing
in a lovely rush.
Over my abode
the default mode
of a mistle thrush.
Bees and beetles,
their low-level hum
as if through a screen.
Brent geese and barnacle geese
disturbing the peace
just before Halloween.
A lithe little linnet
working his magic
from the hazel branch.
It's on an open door the flock
of variegated woodpeckers knock.
They give themselves carte blanche.
Now white seabirds come flying,
herons and gulls
and the sea airs they bruit.
Far from down in the dumps
is the grouse's thump
through red heather shoots.
Then the heifer lowing
in high summer,
daylight on the gain.
Life is far from tough
when we've more than enough
from the bounteous plain.
The call of the wind
through a wood's wickerwork.
Clouds that somehow prevail.
A river that falls
through rocky walls
on such a pleasant scale.
Beautiful, too, the pine trees
that give me music
without my making a pitch.
However wealthy you may be
Christ has left me
no less rich.
Though you delight
in having more treasures
than might easily have sufficed,
I'm quite content
with what is lent
me by that self-same Christ.
I have none of the aggravation
or din of battle
by which your heartstrings are constantly cut,
only gratitude to the Lord
for the gifts he affords
me in my hut.
KING GUAIRE
I would give my kingdom
and all that's due
to me from Colmán for the rest of my days
to live, Marban, as you.
FEDERICO GARCÃA LORCA: “DEATH”
What a tremendous effort they all put into it!
The horse does its damnedest
to become a dog.
The dog tries so hard to become a swallow.
The swallow busies itself with becoming a bee.
The bee does its level best to become a horse.
As for the horse,
just look at the barbed arrow it draws from the rose,
that faint rose lifting from its underlip.
The rose, meanwhile,
what a slew of lights and calls
are bound up in the living sugar of its stem.
The sugar, in turn,
those daggers it conjures while standing watch.
The little daggers themselves,
such a moon minus horse stalls, such nakedness,
such robust and ruddy skin as they're bent upon.
And I, perched on the gable end,
what a blazing angel I aim at being, and am.
The arch made of plaster, howeverâ
how huge, how invisible, then how small it is,
without the least striving.
Of the two on an Elizabethan stage
meant to support the heavens, one's been itemized
as missing since the flit from Shoreditch
left it high and dry
and safe from our cutthroat Doge.
Once it propped up the drunken sailor on a mast
ready with every nod to tumble down,
once obscured a lady in a doublet
yet to be revealed as the long-lost twin
of Starveling or Snug or Sly.
Many an imp from the Forest of Arden
who scaled it with a catapult
or pail of birdlime made from holly bark
to trap a mistle thrush or canary
has returned a confirmed empiric,
extending the use of birdlime to the nether eye
and the bugle hung in an invisible baldric
as a cure for gonorrhea
while poling still across the Thames-Isis.
There we played ducks and drakes
with our cutthroat Dogberry and all those so-and-sos
determined to try
us at the next assizes.
Our conversation about the intrigue
in which the lad dressed as a lady dressed as a lad
who proved the ferret
to your own coney burrow and took such delight
in being singled out as a double-dealing spy
by both Old Gobbo and Lancelot
must have been overheard
by Snug in the shadow of this very pillar â¦
Its shadow lengthened even as
the sun struggled to raise a beam from the blur
and we fell in with the hue and cry
of men-at-arms on the trail of the old King's player
who stole from house to house
in an effort to put himself beyond the reach
of tub-fast and mercuric sulfide.
Now we take comfort in this one-legged arch
beyond which the sky
is leveling a charge
of which we may never be absolved.
Between Dominica and Martinique
we go in search of sperm whales, listening for their tink-tink-tink
on a hydrophone
hooked up to a minispeaker. A prisoner's tap
on a heating pipe â¦
The one faint hope by which he's driven.
My son is reading
Lord of the Flies
. I can think of that book
only as the dog-eared manuscript Charles Monteith would pick
out of the slush pile at Faber's.
I'm pretty sure dear Charles recognized
a version of himself in Piggy. The same prep-school anguish.
Same avuncularity. Same avoirdupois.
Now I imagine lying by my dead wife
just as a sperm whale lies by its dead mate as if
it might truly be said to mourn.
A corruption of the Tamil term for “two logs
lashed together with rope or the like,”
the word we use is “catamaran.”
NEAR THE GRACE OF GOD NAIL SALON
In the slave castle at Cape Coast
I saw slaves pushed from pillar to whipping post
on their way out of Ghana
by the Door of No Return.
I suppose any plain-backed pipit might learn
to sound the vox humana
from its organ reed, given how a woman may take wing
above an open sewer and sing,
making not only her own spirits quicken
but gladdening the heart of a boy who trots in her wake.
She glances back to where the boy (her son?) makes
like that mangy chicken
shooting its cuffs because its suit's so hot.
It being noon, she hasn't much of a shot
at casting a shadow,
even though she carries home
a mess of fish in a basket set on a blue latex foam
mattress pad no
self-respecting fish would be seen dead on.
Near the Grace of God Nail Salon
she pauses to take the basket
from her head,
as though to ponder if she might choose, instead
of a fish-shaped casket,
a casket in the shape of a beer bottle or speedboat.
The mangy chicken, plus a mangy goat,
chime in with the plain-backed pipit
to celebrate her setting the basket back atop
her head as she draws level with the Vote for Jesus Wig Shop.
If there's a balance now I'm inclined to tip it
in favor of the boy who comes back double quick
to seize my wrist despite its being slick
with suntan lotion.
After his recent brush with mange
he, too, is able to rearrange
himself with almost as little commotionâ
with almost as little to-doâ
as the military coup
that ousted Kwame Nkrumah.
Now I see that his entire outfit, from his football shirt
to his sneakers shining in the dirt,
comes courtesy of Puma.
Though her lorgnette
and evening gloves
suggest she's made for the role
