One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (5 page)

of an opera buff

singing along with the score,

her mouth's out of sync

with her own overdub.

A giraffe that flubbed

her lines coming back to drink

just a little more

of the bubbly stuff

from the dried-out mud hole

in which a reflection of

her upper body's already set.

DROMEDARIES AND DUNG BEETLES

An eye-level fleck of straw in the mud wall

is almost as good as gold …

I've ventured into this piss-poor urinal

partly to escape the wail

of thirty milch camels with their colts

as they're readied for our trek

across the dunes, partly because I've guzzled

three glasses of the diuretic

gunpowder tea the Tuareg

hold in such esteem. Their mostly business casual

attire accented by a flamboyant

blue or red nylon grab rope

round their lower jaws, dromedaries point

to a 9-to-5 life of knees bent

in the service of fetching carboys

and carpetbags from A to B across the scarps.

Think Boyne coracles

bucking from wave to wave. Think scarab

beetles rolling their scrips

of dung to a gabfest. These dromedary-gargoyles

are at once menacing and meek

as, railing against their drivers' kicks and clicks,

they fix their beautiful-ugly mugs

on their own Meccas.

The desert sky was so clear last night the galaxies

could be seen to pulse …

The dromedaries were having a right old chin-wag,

each musing on its bolus.

Every so often one would dispense some pills

that turned out to be generic

sheep or goat. The dung beetles set great store

not by the bitter cud

nor the often implausible
Histories

of Herodotus but the stars

they use to guide

themselves over the same sand dunes

as these thirty milch camels

and their colts. They, too, make a continuous

line through Algeria and Tunisia.

Dung beetles have been known to positively gambol

on the outskirts of Zagora, a boom-

town where water finds it hard not to gush

over the date palms.

Despite the clouds of pumice

above Marrakesh even I might find my way to Kesh,

in the ancient barony of Lurg,

thanks to Cassiopeia

and her self-regard. Think of how there lurks

in almost all of us a weakness for the allegorical.

Think of a Moroccan swallow's last gasp

near the wattle-and-daub oppidum

where one of my kinsmen clips

the manes of a groaning chariot team …

Think of Private Henry Muldoon putting his stamp

on the mud of Gallipoli

on August 8, 1915. It appears

he worked as a miner at Higham Colliery

before serving in the Lancasters and the 8th Welsh Pioneers.

His somewhat pronounced ears

confirm his place in the family gallery.

“It's only a blink…” my father used to say. “Only a blink.”

I myself seem to have developed the gumption

to stride manfully out of a neo-Napoleonic

latrine and play my part in the march on Casablanca

during the North African campaign.

SOME PITFALLS AND HOW TO AVOID THEM

    
for Asher

Stratocumulus, or cumulonimbus, the clouds have made such strides

in crossing the Rockies

they've now caught up with us. A diet of buffalo ragout

will leave anyone “in straits”

sooner rather than later. That the glister in a Port-a-John

on a parking lot near Bennigan's

in Fargo, North Dakota, turned out to be a pine cone

doesn't mean the Cheyenne

were wrong to take things at face value.

Bear in mind that “calomel” looks a lot like “chamomile”

to the guy trying to compile

a camping checklist. Given the near certainty they'll fall foul

of some infection of the blood,

snakebite, sundry blisters and boils,

syphilis, dysentery, piles,

and plain old costiveness, Lewis and Clark plied

their entire squad

with Dr. Rush's Bilious Pills,

the upshot being the Corps of Discovery would loosen their bowels

by thunderclaps and quicksilver-scoots

through random pine scrub and clumps of river birch.

Now we've pulled into the Samurai

Sushi Bar and ordered two Godzilla rolls. Bear in mind that Zimri

was king of Israel only as long as it took to purge

himself of himself. Who would have guessed

that J.M.W. Turner was perfecting his ability to scumble

cumulonimbus and stratocumulus

precisely as Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific coast

and built Fort Clatsop? The Cheyenne chewed the gum

of both ponderosa

and lodgepole pines. Bear in mind how our fireside banter

may be lost to the generations to come

but their native scouts

will still be able to follow our route across America

by the traces of mercury

in our scats.

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 are 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 plow 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?

TUSKER

Given that she does nothing by halves

it was hard to see how the wunderkind surgeon from the burn unit would salve

her conscience while trying to keep cool

in the face of a barstool

covered in a whale's foreskin. A yacht on which the swimming pool

converts to a dance floor? It was Aristotle Onassis

who rescued that concept, just as he reclaimed the word “nauseous”

for the shipping industry. The rings in their noses

will prevent overindulgence in beech mast

in a high percentage of hogs but to help them stand fast

against worms a garlic-and-molasses supplement is unsurpassed.

I was feeling such bonhomie

this morning partly because of the burn unit phenom's

evident compassion for the bonham

she was about to sweal

over a Bunsen burner in anticipation of what this might reveal

about the capacity of singed skin to heal.

Last night Hippocrates had prescribed pig fat and vinegar

wrapped around the middle finger

to another freethinker

who'd abandoned (or been abandoned by?) the god

who once clawed

his way out from under six feet of his native sod.

It's inevitable that at least some of the cream and treacle

fed to a tusker will trickle

from his jaws like blood from Dracula.

I was feeling so expansive today at the pig mart

also because I'd met another Large White boar with just one moving part

and vowed to donate to him, if not my heart,

then at least a heart valve.

HONEY

Our plane takes hill upon hill long since cleared of pines. The flash

of matching lakelets. Weather and more weather.

The copilot points to at least one benefit

of felling pines for warship keels, namely how the heather

that pits itself against an old saw pit

and fills in the great gash

of a logging road also sustains our friends the honeybees.

The coroner at the scene of the crash

found the seams of Buddy Holly's jacket of yellow faux leather

“split almost full-length” and his skull also “split.”

Buddy's personal effects amounted to a pair of cufflinks together

with the top of a ballpoint pen and, barely within his remit,

the $193.00 in cash

from which the coroner deducted $11.65 in fees.

SEVEN SELFIES FROM THE CHÂTEAU D'IF

    
1

I too was flung into a cell so dark

I'd hunger for the black and moldy bread

that all too soon defined my comfort zone.

I cast my mind back for some ill-judged phrase,

unguarded look, circumstance I'd misread,

some vibe I gave at which some took offense.

    
2

I too have heard another scratch his mark

with such conviction as might match my own.

    
3

I too was schooled by a high-minded monk

who ruled the world-book must be read aloud.

    
4

It took both winter freeze and summer freeze

to yield growth rings so uniformly dense

my tone brought back a Stradivarius—

demure-insistent, delicate-immense.

    
5

I too switched with a dead man in his bunk

and stitched myself into his burlap shroud.

    
6

I too have heard ghoulish pallbearers scoff

while I've kept cool and clutched my toothbrush shank.

    
7

I too am hurtling down with such great force

it's even harder to keep playing dead

while knowing in my bones I shouldn't tense

myself for impact. Soon I will slit the cloth

and, having freed one arm, then free my head

and hope to surface far from where I sank.

THE FIRING SQUAD

I am going to tell you something I never but once let out of the bag before and that was just after I reached London and before I had begun to value myself for what I was worth. It is a very damaging secret and you may not thank me for taking you into it when I tell you that I have often wished I could be sure that the other sharer of it had perished in the war. It is this: The poet in me died nearly ten years ago.

—
ROBERT FROST TO LOUIS UNTERMEYER, MAY
4, 1916

I am very happy I am dying for the glory of God and the honour of Ireland.

—
JOSEPH MARY PLUNKETT TO FATHER SEBASTIAN, MAY
4, 1916

Something I never but once let on

is that I am as ready to be hanged, drawn,

and quartered as the Blessed Oliver, as ready as his sober-suited

descendant, Joseph Mary Plunkett,

to be shot—all the more so if I've married my beloved Grace

only hours before. Like many of my race,

I've come to see English plantain as a flatfooted

weed terminating in an oblongoid

spike of flowers like the head of a mace.

It tends to establish itself in the least likely place,