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  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  Cuthbert and the Otters

  Pelt

  Charles Émile Jacque: Poultry Among Trees

  Pip and Magwitch

  A Dent

  Dodgems

  Barrage Balloons, Buck Alec, Bird Flu, and You

  Rita Duffy: Watchtower II

  A Night on the Tiles with J. C. Mangan

  Saffron

  At the Lab

  A Civil War Suite

  Recalculating

  We Love the Horse Because Its Haunch

  Anonymous: From “Marban and Guaire”

  Federico García Lorca: “Death”

  A Pillar

  Catamaran

  Near the Grace of God Nail Salon

  A Giraffe

  Dromedaries and Dung Beetles

  Some Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

  Cuba (2)

  Tusker

  Honey

  Seven Selfies from the Château d’If

  The Firing Squad

  Álvaro de Campos: “Belfast, 1922”

  Los Dissidentes

  Required Fields

  To Market, to Market

  Noah & Sons

  Paul Muldoon: “Pompeii”

  Camille Pissarro: Apple Picking at Eragny-sur-Epte

  Dirty Data

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ALSO BY PAUL MULDOON

  COPYRIGHT

  CUTHBERT AND THE OTTERS

  In memory of Seamus Heaney

  Notwithstanding the fact that one of them has gnawed a strip of flesh

  from the shoulder of the salmon,

  relieving it of a little darne,

  the fish these six otters would fain

  carry over the sandstone limen

  and into Cuthbert’s cell, a fish garlanded with bay leaves

  and laid out on a linden flitch

  like a hauberked warrior laid out on his shield,

  may yet be thought of as whole.

  An entire fish for an abbot’s supper.

  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 “chamomile.” 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 plow. 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 hind wing 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 g
antries, 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 chamomile 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 G.I. on the bridge

  at Toome. I want to step in to play my part

  while the sky above the hermitage

  does a flip chart.

  Gray, blue, gray, blue, gray. 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 ax-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-armored 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.

  CHARLES ÉMILE JACQUE: POULTRY AMONG TREES

  It was in Eglish that my father kept the shop

  jam-packed with Inglis loaves, butter,

  Fray Bentos corned beef, Omo, Daz, Beechams Powders,

  Andrews liver salts, Halls cough drops,

  where I wheezed longingly from my goose-downed truckle

  at a Paris bun’s sugared top.

  A tiny bell rang sweetly. The word on the tip

  of my tongue was “honeysuckle.”

  When one of his deep-litter chickens filled its crop

  with hay from the adjoining shed

  my father opened it with a razor blade, reached

  in, pulled out the shimmering sop,

  then sewed it up with a darning needle and thread.

  That childhood memory came back

  now a fracas had left two hens with gaping beaks,

  one with what seemed a severed head.

  Though I might have taken the blueprint of a shack

  from Poultry Keeping for Dummies,

  I’d fancied myself more an Ovid in Tomis—

  determined to wing it, to tack

  together Jahangiri Mahal from a jumble

  of 2×4 studs, malachite,

  run-of-the-mill planks, cedar shingles, more offcuts

  in New Jersey’s rough-and-tumble.

  Now it looked as if there had been a pillow fight

  in and around the chicken run.

  Our pointer, Sherlock, had instigated a reign

  of terror, scaring the daylights

  out of the hens (in a spirit of good clean fun,

  no doubt), launching a morning raid

  such as Meleager & Co. had launched to root

  out the great boar of Calydon.

  Their temperature being 106 centigrade

  might account for the quizzical

  view chickens take of history going in cycles,

  but I could divine from the jade

  of her exposed neck, the movement of her gizzard

  jewelled by broken oyster shells,

  one hen had ventured so far on the gravel shoals

  she’d become less hen than lizard.

  As the echoes of Sherlock’s high-pitched rebel yells

  clung to the thatch in a smoke knot,
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  I’d only very gradually taken note

  how Herbert Hoover’s casting spells

  (and offering that “chicken in every pot”)

  had come too late for Robert Frost,

  cooped up as he’d been on the edge of a forest

  with some 300 Wyandottes.

  Odd that the less obviously wounded hen be lost

  to the great realm of the cageless

  while a slash-throat somehow lingers. Though I cudgeled

  my brains, the only thought that crossed

  my mind was how the sisters of Meleager

  had once morphed into guinea hens.

  I found myself looking to Aries, the heinous

  Dog Star, then to Ursa Major.

  Those next few days, the slash-throat held out a quill pen

  with which we might together draw

  up a plan for how I could help her muddle through.

  Her comb and wattles were cayenne

  under a heat lamp. Her throat left my own throat raw.

  She lifted her head on its latch.

  It was as if a sop of hay had become lodged

  in my own mother-of-pearled craw.

  The ears of barley, whole wheat, and corn mixed from scratch

  I boiled down further. My new razor

  had me on edge. I was such an early riser

  I’d become less man than rooster. An extra batch

  of the barley/wheat/corn mush might help her brazen

  it out. Till she could shake a leg

  (and a wing!), I’d feed her the stuff I myself like—

  marigolds, cottage cheese, raisins.

  Though Fabergé’s first inlaying a gilt hen egg

  was by imperial decree

  it’s easy to see why we dunghill roosters crow

  when we set off a powder keg

  at our own behest, winding ourselves with a key

  till our workaday art’s a match

  for workaday life, a feature rarely as much

  to the fore as in Poultry Among Trees.

  Here the angle of the ridgepole (though blurred by thatch)

  leads the eye to an odd focal

  point where two hen harriers confirm how fickle

  is our grasp on things. If a patched

  chicken did once attest to his skill in sewing,

  my father still boned up in full

  on “how to remove the merry-thought of a fowl”

  from One Thousand Things Worth Knowing.

  Even if I have helped my own hen to pull

  through by dint of mash and mush-talk

  I’m still far less disposed to look to the sky dog

  for assent, or to the sky bull,

  to look to any of those old cocks-of-the-walk.

  Not for me strutting out at dusk

  and pretending to be equal to any task

  while sporting a cayenne Mohawk.