One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (6 page)

exercising a feudal

droit du seigneur on pavements, parking lots where battery

acid and diesel have bled

into the soil, drive-ins where we're wooed by, and wed

to, the whole kit and caboodle

of empire. As for a priest or padre

laying about him with his holy-water sprinkler, it has me see red

no less than if he wielded a flint ax-head

made by an old-style flint knapper.

That's why I get up from my pillow (filled, as it happens, with buckwheat)

to set my face against the dawn.

As I stride out now across the Institute lawn

I look all the more dapper

for the white handkerchief so firmly lodged in my breast pocket.

ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS: “BELFAST, 1922”

While a great gantry

at the head of the lough

continues to stand sentry

a team of shipyard men rush to caulk

a seam. No dunnock in a choir

of dunnocks will relent

from claiming as its own the gore

of land on which Harland

and Wolff is built. Catching a rivet

in a pair of tongs

and banging it into a rift

will hardly mend it. The dun in
dun
nock

doesn't allow for the dash

of silver in its head and throat feathers.

Because chicks within one clutch

often have different fathers,

dunnocks are at once highly territorial

and likely to go unremarked.

Though they've been known to drill

in Glenavy and Deer Park,

the dunchered shipyard men are no less peaceable

than those of Barrow-in-Furness.

Souped up, staid, swerveless, supple,

they hold in equal reverence

the pennywhistle and the plenilunar

pigskin of a Lambeg drum,

be they sending off a White Star liner

or a little tramp.

LOS DISSIDENTES

Coming to anything late in the day has an allure

all its own. The river plummets here with such aplomb

it brings back Slim Pickens's holler

as he bronco-busts the H-bomb

in
Dr. Strangelove
. We like it when things are stacked

against us, when beavers are showing

initiative at the beaver dam. We take comfort from the fact

that after years of scenery-chewing

Rockets Redglare thoroughly upped

his profile with his role in
Down by Law.

Though the file

is almost certainly corrupt,

we can still hope to salvage something from the raw

footage of the waterfall.

REQUIRED FIELDS

Then we could ride all day and yet

not reach the farthest edge of our demesne,

its slow handclap of grouse

impatient for the mist-wreathed

curtain of the moor

to rise. Remember the beech

where we were filed

under our noms de plume,

the chestnut tree where a soul was known to roost

before it was set in linotype

or its path laid

in herringbone? For a second asterisk

we'd use a dagger, then double daggers

for the third footnote.

There was a time when accountants took into account

our dim view of paying tax.

Now so much else dims

while the phonograph bends its ear

toward the ice trumpet. Yes. The ice trumpet

recorded in the Ice Hotel

that we now favor over Strauss.

An impasto sheep

well used to some rule of thumb

poses with a donkey-easel

against a hemmed-in sky.

Along the fraying torrent

that itself runs along the stage

the deerhounds strut and fret.

Then we had something like free rein

to laugh with the half-crazed maid from
Die Fledermaus

who laughed till her bosom heaved

uncontrollably. The horse manure

smelling of bleach,

how artfully
that
was piled!

I think of the stable groom

turned tour guide who's still known to boost

his minimum wage

by dressing up as a bit of a swell.

They found a credit-card receipt for petrol used to douse

the barn and set fire to a Jeep.

The stable walls were
opus spicatum
.

Everybody knows that teazle

is the prototype of the hook and eye.

It was that stable groom, I'll warrant,

who made a strumpet

of not only Colonel Knipe's

but our own kitchen maid—

the one with the “slipped disc.”

My gelding once again took the head staggers

just as I was taking a straw vote

as to whether I should mount

a campaign. Someone brought an ax

to bear on why we'd carved our pseudonyms

on a tree. Was it for fear

we might someday be reconciled

to the idea we can maintain

this tumbledown old manor house

only because we've bequeathed

it to the nation? As it is, guided tour after guided tour

brings home to each

of us how we've let

go of all but seven rooms

to which, we overhear, we are “reduced.”

TO MARKET, TO MARKET

    
1

I'm sure one of the reasons J. J. Astor had been under such duress

was that he recently leaned over to the lady seated next to him at a dinner party

and wiped his hands on her muslin dress …

Maybe he'd had a little too much of a Bordeaux

run up by Phelan or Lynch,

two Irish chemists vying for parity

with Boyle and Beaufort. Treacle bread and cheese in cheesecloth, that's the lunch

my father carries as he stands in line

in this predawn dark, waiting for a mower-laden truck to launch

him beyond the realm of the Guatemalans

with whom he tries to keep abreast. Their Igloo coolers are packed with beans and rice

in anticipation of their being hired for the day by Princeton Complete Lawn.

    
2

After a day of shouldering bales of cauliflowers in the pouring rain

my back was itself a broad leaf, rainwater coursing down the groove of its mid-vein.

NOAH & SONS

    
1

A solitary ewe stood guard

like a widow in her mantle

at the entrance to the graveyard.

One line ran all the way from my pommel through my cantle

to the Massey Ferguson baler

while lovers screamed with tumult harsh

and a converted whaler

sank slowly into the alder marsh.

As we cantered across the stubble

we managed to double

back on ourselves like hares

fleeing a primal scene

to which we're bound to repair

as long as yellow + blue = green.

    
2

For “ewe” read “yew.”

For “baler” read “thrasher.”

For “retina” read “retinue.”

For “Ashur” read “Asher.”

For “fathead” read “minnow.”

For “shame” read “Shem.”

For “window” read “winnow.”

For “bract” read “stem.”

For “missile” read “Missal.”

For “darnel“read “thistle.”

For “skewered” read “skewed.”

For “hart” read “chart.”

For “Freud” read “feud.”

For “dirt” read “dart.”

    
3

Now we were galloping across the swamp

showing little or no decorum,

little or no pomp.

This wasn't the first time we'd had three or four jorums

too many. For years the heavens had pummeled

us not only with regulation hail

but blow bolts fledged with the comal

tufts of bulrush or cattail.

It seemed marsh elder still made for a blowgun

that raised itself like its own slogan

while “Bring it on”

was the rallying cry

of the thistles now at daggers drawn

that had once seen eye to eye.

PAUL MULDOON: “POMPEII”

    
1

On the street a boy still mends

a puncture on his bike,

paying out an inner tube

from a tire

and keeping an eye out for a ripple

in the plastic basin.

Like trying to cajole

a red-bellied snake

from the hood of an Oldsmobile

on which it basks.

Jayne's rubberized bathing costume.

How that costume clung.

    
2

It was during the Festival of the Kalends

we'd seen something of a spike

in the ratings when an ice cube

had all but set fire

to Jayne's right nipple.

A pneumatic caisson

was used less for digging coal

than tunnels. Part of my mistake

was that roses and steel

may both be termed “damask.”

Then there's the rose that blooms

on a coal miner's lung.

    
3

A bridge builder will get the bends

if his coworkers hike

him too suddenly. Her trip to Jiffy Lube

had Jayne aspire

to a McDonald's Triple.

A sex game involving asphyxiation

conjured by bubbles from a pinprick hole.

The surface those bubbles break

likely to reveal

itself only in the sense a mask

reveals who's lain with whom.

The tire's black dog. The inner tube's dog tongue.

CAMILLE PISSARRO:
APPLE PICKING AT ERAGNY-SUR-EPTE

Christ may as well have been hanged

for a sheep as a lamb,

given how the so-called panking pole

loosening a dam

of apples lodged between boles

is used by one of the work gang

to pierce his side. His garment

strewn on the grass

is a shadow without a seam.

Two of the women grub in the morass

for anything they might deem

salvageable after attacks by varmints

of various stripes. A third stares at his rib cage,

stifling her gasp

in anticipation of another gush of blood

and water. The centurion grasps

his pole more tightly as if the flash flood

of apples might be about to gauge

its own significance.

That middle-distant horse asleep between the shafts

is at least absolved of the mounting block.

Given the successive grafts

of noble scions upon noble stocks,

when I glance

from my hotel window

even I discern

a possibility

I might too readily have spurned—

that any of these rangy, raw-boned trees

is the one I will turn into.

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!

The doctor is cocking an ear to your chest's tumble-de-drum

like a man trying to open a safe.

To add to the confusion, Ben's still trying to crack a lobster claw

with a lobster claw made of titanium.

Ben has somehow been playing scuffle on his washboard abs

while eating all that treif.

It looks like 1961. Or '65. No time before a few squatters from the prefabs

in Dungannon morph into the crowd the paratroopers strafe

on Bloody Sunday. A golden dolphin marks the lap run by each new

Roman tribune. Whitelaw. Pym. Rees. Mason.

Atkins. Prior. Hurd. King. Brooke. Mayhew.

Dense, too, the fog when each Halloween Ben ducks in an enamel basin

for an enamel apple

and comes up with a botched job.

Such is the integrity of their kraal the horses will find no slot

in the funeral cortege of Winston Churchill from the Royal Chapel

to Woodstock. As his carriage passes the dolphins bob

for a commoner's mere 19- rather than a no-stops-pulled 21-gun salute.

Along the Thames, meanwhile, even the cranes will bow

and scrape as the coffin passes the Isle of Dogs and the citizenry grapple

with their sense of loss. The
Havengore
's prow

will no more shake off a water dapple

than we'll concede we've been excluded from a race.

It looks as if Little Miss Messala, played by a Belfast boy, will clutch

at the idea he might drive a tea-chest bass