One Thousand Things Worth Knowing Read online

  Once I glimpsed the ideal under a dry husk.

  All I see now is the foible

  in a sword. I often think of Aesop’s fable

  where a great boar sharpens his tusk

  against all likelihood. Now being a goitered

  rooster is all that’s on the cards

  for me, I suspect, consigned to the pile of grit

  I myself once reconnoitered.

  I was a Rhode Island Red rooster standing guard

  in Eglish as my father sliced.

  “Think like a man of action,” wrote Mr. Sallust,

  “act like a man of thought.” The yard

  opened on my less-than-steady Peter, then Christ,

  then the rum-numbed hen, then the nail

  from which it hung. As an emblem of renewal,

  surely that hen would have sufficed?

  My own new regimen of cottage cheese and kale

  continues to help me toughen

  my resolve in ways Sherlock himself might divine.

  The elongation of his tail

  has been traced to a long line of partridge flushers

  and catchers of hares on the hop.

  I don’t mind being relegated to the heap

  where I once stood as both door and usher.

  For I’ve no aspirations now ever to strop

  my beak on the bark of a church.

  Ever to be a weather vane … To be in charge …

  That’s for a motorcycle cop,

  all Ray-Bans and chrome, so ill at ease on the perch

  of a fire escape in a flop-

  house in west L.A., the downy feathers he’ll flip

  through in a routine background search.

  Now my right-as-rain hen, like my father’s post-op

  hen, will shine out from her dunghill.

  That sweet little bell … I recognize its tinkle …

  Another customer who’ll drop

  by for Bisto, Bovril, Colman’s English Mustard,

  liquorice allsorts, lollipops,

  War Horse plug tobacco, Gillette razors, Bo-Peeps,

  Chivers Jelly, or Bird’s Custard.

  PIP AND MAGWITCH

  In an effort to distract his victim and throw the police off his scent,

  Anwar al-Awlaki had left a paperback of Great Expectations

  all bundled up with a printer-cartridge bomb. They found his fingerprints

  on the page—wouldn’t you know?—where Dickens,

  having put us all in a quandary on the great marshes of Kent,

  now sets us down with Pip and the leg-ironed convict, Abel Magwitch,

  Pip forever chained to Magwitch by dint

  of having brought him a pork pie and file in a little care package.

  For the moment, he’s a seven-year-old whose Christmas Eve’s spent

  trying to come up with a way to outfox

  this hard-line neighbor, unshaven, the smell of a Polo Mint

  not quite masking his breath, his cigar twirling in its unopened sarcophagus

  like an Egyptian mummy, one dismissive of the chance

  it will ever come into its inheritance.

  A DENT

  In memory of Michael Allen

  The height of one stall at odds with the next in your grandfather’s byre

  where cattle allowed themselves to speak only at Yule

  gave but little sense of why you taught us to admire

  the capacity of a three-legged stool

  to take pretty much everything in its stride,

  even the card-carrying Crow who let out a war whoop

  now your red pencil was poised above my calf-hide

  manuscript like a graip above a groop.

  The depth of a dent in the flank of your grandfather’s cow

  from his having leaned his brow

  against it morning and night

  for twenty years of milking by hand

  gave but little sense of how distant is the land

  on which you had us set our sights.

  DODGEMS

  The pink cloud hanging over Barry’s amusement park in Portrush.

  So plainspoken, candy floss. The Freemasons’ Hall

  boarded up for the whole month of August. The almost constant rainfall.

  We’re right between the start of the grouse- and partridge-

  shooting seasons. Red sails in the sunset way off Portstewart.

  I’ve resorted to singing “Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”

  to the landlady’s Pekingese.

  The bookcase in the B&B holds Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha,

  the American first edition. It’s 1960. The decade being ushered

  in may yet be a decade of selflessness. My hankering for that hula hoop

  stands in the way of enlightenment. The biplane looping the loop.

  Even Ramore Head will have its right shoulder bared

  à la Buddha. The wooden roller coaster will eventually get on track.

  For now it’s all about novelty,

  starting with novelty songs. The landlady shyly denies supporting Linfield.

  Shane Leslie has handed over the deed of Lough Derg

  to the Diocese of Clogher. The landlady’s demurral

  is in strict contrast with these no-nonsense

  bumper cars. It cuts no ice with them, the thought of sitting on the fence.

  I’d hoped a gelato from Morelli’s

  might help me through the chapter on avarice.

  For now I’m joined on the rink by the dodgem boy, an out-and-out maniac.

  Our electrical pick-up poles are the tails of chipmunks.

  Though our celestial canopy is on the fritz,

  I’m blessed with a godlike cotton-candy beard.

  Our pick-up poles may be quite forthright, our confrontations quite unabashed,

  but the lambskin apron in which the dodgem boy collects the cash

  is symbolic of a pure heart.

  BARRAGE BALLOONS, BUCK ALEC, BIRD FLU, AND YOU

  for Dermot Seymour

  After those first paintings at Art Research and Exchange

  I would never again be able to go home, never mind home on the range.

  The Swede who invented the Aga

  had previously lost his sight to an explosion. The rain summoned by a blackbird’s raga

  came sweeping over the Shankill, over the burning car

  where Boston and Lowther were dumped, having been fingered in the bar

  as a Prod and a Pape

  enjoying a wee jar together. A wee escapade. A wee escape.

  That would have been January 1977, when you were twenty, I twenty-five.

  An era when we might still devoutly skive

  off for the afternoon to the Washington or the Crown Liquor Saloon.

  Almost every day someone floated a barrage balloon

  over the city. We treated the wicker fence

  that ran between us with such reverence

  it might have been hooked up not to the balloon covered in ox-hide strips

  but the “ox-hide” ingots of tin from a sunken Phoenician ship.

  Until I met you in Tedford’s Ship Chandlers, where we’d both gone to buy new sails,

  I’d assumed the boat I was in was the largest not to use nails.

  All along you’d been spirit-gumming a Harrier jump jet

  while the wind blew its own trumpet

  at the exploits of Buck Alec Robinson and Silver McKee.

  In Sailortown alone there were three

  of those sweetie shops

  where they still sold pieties at a penny a pop.

  In the midst of all those sacred cows, in the midst of the fish, flesh, and fowl,

  we heard only the limer-hounds howl

  as they pursued a mountain hare we’d taken as our totem.

  Often a swollen scrotum

  may not be traced back to an ill-fitting loincloth

  just as not all potato diseases may be laid
at the door of the potato moth.

  On Cave Hill, meanwhile, the hunt was on and the time was ripe

  for the limer-hounds to revert to type.

  Though you may dismiss as utter tosh

  my theory this gung-ho stallion’s by Bacon out of Bosch,

  there’s no denying a rooster

  will put most of us in a flooster

  while the pig that turns out to be less pig than ham

  is every bit as alarming. Am I right in thinking that’s meant to be a ram

  in a ferraiolo cape?

  Hasn’t the ewe with scrapie got herself into a scrape?

  I don’t suppose the moorland streams over which the huntsmen ride roughshod

  and the puddles through which their horses plod

  will give rise to enough salmon

  to fertilize the soil and stave off another famine.

  I hadn’t seen the connection between “spade” and “spud”

  and “quid” and “cud”

  till I noticed the mouth of an Indian elephant from the same troupe

  the filmmakers fitted with “African” ears and tusks was stained with nettle soup.

  It’s taken me thirty years to discover the purple dye on your royal mail

  derives not from a sea snail

  but the fact you’re a scion

  of the house in which Buck Alec kept a lion,

  albeit a toothless lion, which he was given to parade along the Old Shore Road.

  I still half-expect to meet Buck Alec conducting a merkin-toad

  on the end of a piece of Tedford’s rope

  while decrying as aberrations Henry Joy McCracken and Jemmy Hope.

  We’ve all been there, I realize, on the brink

  of a butte covered with sea pink

  and rising from the swell like an organ pedal.

  Think of Kit Carson, Freemason as he was, winning another tin medal

  for giving the Navajo the old “Get Thee Hence”

  from their pinnacle. Although the UK is now under mass surveillance

  this ram couldn’t give a tuppenny tup

  about the passing of the cup.

  Even Christ’s checking us out from his observation post.

  Even he can’t quite bend Tiocfaidh Ár Lá to the tune of “Ghost

  Riders in the Sky.” An Orangeman in his regalia is still regaling us with a sermon

  about the ways of Fermanagh men and other vermin.

  The Aga-inventor continues to gape

  through the streetscape

  of smoke and dust and broken glass flickering down like so much ticker tape

  from the entry into Jerusalem of the King of the Apes.

  RITA DUFFY: WATCHTOWER II

  1

  From here it looks as if the whole country is spread under a camouflage tarp

  rolled out by successive British garrisons

  stationed in Crossmaglen. As teenagers we worked our way through Íosagán

  Agus Sgéalta Eile while selling shocks and struts

  from a tumbledown garage. Our vision of Four Green Fields shrinks to the olive drab

  the Brits throw over everything. This must be their version of a tour d’horizon,

  their scanners scanning our hillsides while we still try to scan

  a verse by Pádraig Pearse. One advantage of a farm that, as they say, bestrides

  the border is how industrial diesel

  dyed with a green dye ferries itself from the South into the North

  by force of gravity alone. The fact that laundered diesel’s then worth

  twice at much at the pump supports the usual

  tendencies of the punters to misjudge

  our motives and see us as common criminals. Like seeing smoke in a paint smudge.

  2

  One of our neighbors, interned for selling An Phoblacht, learned we’re not the first tribe

  to have been put down or the first to have risen

  against our oppressors. That’s why we’ve always sided with the Redskin

  and the Palestinian. It must be because steroids

  are legal in the North but not the South the Brits like to eavesdrop

  on our comings and goings. As for kerosene,

  the fact that it’s cheaper in the North is enough to sicken

  our happiness. That and the upstarts

  who try to horn in on our operation. We’re in a constant tussle

  with these Seoiníns-come-lately, a constant back-and-forth

  on the business of smuggling fuel. We run it through cat litter or fuller’s earth

  to absolve it of the dye. By far the biggest hassle

  is trying to get rid of the green sludge

  left over from the process. It infiltrates our clothes. It’s impossible to budge.

  A NIGHT ON THE TILES WITH J. C. MANGAN

  1

  Some call for “macerated.” Some call for “stewed.”

  The prunes are oddly fizzy

  from narcosis.

  2

  Not that Francis Bacon. That Francis Bacon.

  The barcode

  on the cereal box is Ogham.

  3

  At least we haven’t misconstrued

  two eggs over easy

  as a lace-frilled pair of knickers.

  4

  At least we haven’t mistaken

  a bottle of Paraquat

  for a 1990 Château d’Yquem.

  5

  We’ll swear this is the last time as we swore the rain

  would never darken our doors again.

  SAFFRON

  Sometimes I’d happen on Alexander and Cleopatra

  and several of their collaborators

  tucking into a paella

  tinged with saffron, saffron thought to be a cure

  for scabies, bloody scours,

  fires in the belly,

  skin cancer, the ancient pestilence of Sumer,

  not to speak of Alzheimer’s

  and plain old melancholy.

  I’m pretty sure things first

  started to look bleak in 1987 at the University

  of East Anglia

  where I was introduced to the art of the lament

  by Ezekiel. His electric fire’s single element

  was an orange ice lolly.

  He made me think I might lose my spot

  as number one hod carrier in Mesopotamia,

  a role that came quite easily

  now I lived in a ziggurat

  overlooking a man-made lake and sipped sugared

  water with a swarm of honeybees.

  Though A Flock of Seagulls

  were scheduled to play the Union, there had been an icicle

  in my heart since Anubis,

  half-man, half-jackal,

  had palmed me off on Ezekiel

  for ritual embalmment.

  He claimed A Flock of Seagulls were a one-hit wonder,

  desert flowers left high and dry

  on the polder. Anubis refused to implement

  the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

  He also told me the church clock in Crimond

  had sixty-one minutes

  to the hour. Ezekiel, meanwhile, was convinced

  that Creative Writing, still in its infancy,

  would amount

  to a bona fide

  academic pursuit only if students weren’t spoon-fed

  but came to think of literature

  as magical rather than magisterial.

  Saffron itself was derived from the three stigma-tufts of a sterile

  crocus that, ground, were often adulterated

  with turmeric. An icicle was formed

  precisely because it would repeatedly warm

  to the idea of camaraderie,

  then repeatedly give in to chilliness.

  I took comfort from the insistence of the anchoress, Julian,

  on the utter

  necessity of sin for self-k
nowledge, a theory I’d have to tout

  to the Hare Krishna devotees

  who’d sworn off sex outside procreation in marriage.

  Sometimes I’d see one, late at night, in saffron robe and topknot,

  stranded at a bus stop

  on the outskirts of Norwich.

  AT THE LAB

  Somewhere off the Grand Banks

  a lapstrake sea that sailed into the teeth

  of a gale now foundered on a reef

  and promptly sank.

  I was at the lab to analyze the spore

  in a seaweed wreath

  marking the spot where it came to grief,

  you the pollen in a sediment core

  from a bog in Ireland where, thanks

  to its being built plank-upon-plank

  (each rig fastened to the one beneath),

  a plowed field running alongside the shore

  had reached North America before

  Eric or Leif.

  A CIVIL WAR SUITE

  1. MATHEW BRADY: FIRST BATTLE OF BULL RUN

  Wasn’t it, after all, Irish riffraff

  from the docks of New Orleans,

  Irish “wharf rats,”

  louts and longshoremen,

  Irish toughs and roughs

  (any of whom would gleefully drive a lance

  through the heart

  of William Tecumseh Sherman),

  Irish rogues and rapscallions,

  culchies and munchies

  who’d make up the 1st Louisiana Special Battalion

  at the First Battle of Manassas

  and allow Brady to become such a dab

  hand at fixing that guerre in Daguerreotype?

  2. WALT WHITMAN: “CAVALRY CROSSING A FORD”

  It’s hardly too much to trace the “guidon”

  to the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine

  and her idea of chivalry bred in the bone.

  The “loitering” horses about to spill their guts

  are by Keats, for sure, but Keats

  out of Tennyson.

  That “musical clank” is Whitman’s alone.

  3. LOUIS LANG: RETURN OF THE 69TH (IRISH) REGIMENT, N.Y.S.M. FROM THE SEAT OF WAR

  It’s been just a week since they were seen off

  by Stonewall Jackson at Bull Run,

  which may be why the only one to doff

  his cap as if there might be an outbreak of fun

  is Captain Meagher, an intimate of muddling through