One Thousand Things Worth Knowing
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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.