One Thousand Things Worth Knowing Read online

  since he escaped Van Diemen’s Land in 1852.

  You’ll notice how a smoothbore gun

  of the type Meagher favors for close combat

  has found its way into the hands

  of two brothers who are themselves in a spat

  as to why a bayonet might expand

  on an entry wound. Sometimes it’s only by a crowded pier

  we recognize what we hold dear.

  The rifle points toward the linen bands

  in which Sergeant Tracy’s own wounds are wrapped.

  His wife helps him off the baggage cart.

  Lieutenant Nugent’s right arm is strapped

  awkwardly in a sling. The crowd must surely part

  before these six or seven drummer boys.

  We can all but hear the poise

  they bring to those snare drums. It’s a tribute to Lang’s art

  that we might for a moment forget the sniper

  to whom so much of this may be assigned

  and focus on an uilleann piper

  lodged in the shadows, for when it comes to what lies behind

  the impulse to fade

  into the background at this or any parade

  the truth is he’s no less blind

  to us than we are to him.

  I doubt somehow he’ll ever make a start

  on learning “The Battle Hymn

  of the Republic.” I suppose some might take heart

  from Father O’Reilly confiding in a widow how this cup

  will pass while drawing up

  a slightly revised version of the heaven chart

  or the half-smile on a man who greets his child

  for the first time, or the non-sniper up a tree,

  or even the piper who’s beguiled

  Meagher into thinking Ireland might soon be free.

  Stooped though he may be over his chanter and drones,

  he raises everything a semitone

  and allows us for the first time to see

  beyond the harbor sky with its rents and rips

  to what is now a no-fly dome

  where we at last begin to get to grips

  with the discontinued Kodachrome

  of our great transports

  that hardly ever put into ports

  and our flag-draped coffins secretly airlifted home.

  4. EMILY DICKINSON: “A SLASH OF BLUE—A SWEEP OF GRAY”

  Here some still scout

  a vineyard path

  to trample out

  the grapes of wrath …

  How many died

  in the bloodbath?

  This side? That side?

  You do the math.

  5. SALLY MANN: MANASSAS

  Less the idea of what the world might be “like”

  than what it is “like photographed”

  has had us lug

  over glacier-grooved

  and -polished mountains what we once took

  for luggage, bags of hominy grits,

  barrels of pork and hardtack,

  wall-to-wall crates

  of wet-glass negatives,

  the tackle by which we still hold on with grim

  determination to our salt codfish,

  the portable darkroom

  in which we’ve yet to cure

  ourselves of the idea that art is “pure” or “impure.”

  RECALCULATING

  1

  Arthritis is to psoriasis as Portugal is to Brazil.

  Brazil is to wood as war club is to war.

  War is to wealth as performance is to appraisal.

  Appraisal is to destiny as urn is to ear.

  Ear is to grasshopper as China is to DDT.

  Tea is to leaf as journalist is to source.

  Source is to leak as Ireland is to debt.

  Debt is to honor as arthritis is to psoriasis.

  2

  Wait. Isn’t arthritis to psoriasis as Brazil is to Portugal?

  Portugal is to fado as Boaz is to Ruth.

  Ruth is to cornfield as wave is to particle.

  3

  Particle is to beach as pebble is to real estate.

  Realty is to reality as sky is to earth.

  Earth is to all ye know as done is to dusted.

  WE LOVE THE HORSE BECAUSE ITS HAUNCH

  We love the horse because its haunch

  most brings to mind our own,

  its back to a wall of freezing rain

  that’s mounting a smear campaign.

  An ancient riverbed on Mars

  throws up the rounded stones

  prized less by quarriers

  or men given to hoist the hod

  than those who hope still to relaunch

  a phalanx (cf. planche)

  of Roman catapults

  from a refitted aircraft carrier.

  Once Roman women went so far

  as to set up a cult

  to rival that of great mother

  Cybele, Cybele

  the goddess of bee dunes and buzz drones

  lodging in the frontal bone,

  whose braids have always been unclasped,

  her hair tri na cheile

  like the mare’s before a farrier

  who is himself somewhat slipshod.

  Little has looked more through-other

  than the old lime pother

  where two smiths go at it

  hammer and tongs, two border terriers

  with their many hoof-knives and rasps

  scattered in the horse shit

  while they try to wrangle the hoop

  off a chariot wheel.

  Until now, that is, when Cybele

  opens fire on the bailey

  where the Normans have learned to cant

  the rim of that same wheel.

  A young marsh-harrier

  will go traipsing through air it’s trod

  because it’s out of the loop,

  only gradually learning to stoop

  as a fully fledged hawk

  attempting to break the sound barrier.

  Those whose experience is scant

  will most enjoy the chalk

  downs and all such pleasant vistas

  afforded by tunics,

  by plackets or stomachers that seal

  almost more than they reveal

  when ripped open, by Jove …

  As to which war, it was the Second Punic

  where a spear carrier

  who’d himself been given a prod

  because he’d somehow just missed a

  cue claimed four ballistas

  set off the string quartet

  in the spirit of “the more the merrier.”

  It was those catapults that drove

  Roman women to let

  their hair grow right down to their waists

  for twisting into skeins

  and stretching our sense of the funic-

  ular to modern Munich.

  Some early fragmentation bombs

  were the calcified brains

  of Celtic warriors

  (i.e., Mesgegra, Oh my God!),

  against which combatants have faced

  off and straightaway braced

  themselves with the staunchness

  of such practiced feinters and parriers

  as two girls at a senior prom

  who’ve worn the same slit dress.

  ANONYMOUS: FROM ‘‘MARBAN AND GUAIRE’’

  KING GUAIRE

  My brother Marban, hermit monk,

  why don’t you sleep in a bed

  instead of among pine trees, with only the forest floor

  on which to lay your tonsured head?

  MARBAN THE HERMIT

  As it happens, I have a hut in the forest.

  Its precise location

  is known only to God, but I can report

  that on one side an ash tree stands guard

  while the other is barred

&n
bsp; by a hazel such as you’d find at a ringfort.

  Heather stands in for its doorposts

  and fragrant honeysuckle

  binds its lintel fast.

  For the benefit of the pigs

  beech trees let fall beech twigs

  and pig-fattening mast.

  The dimensions of my hut—

  small but not too small—

  make it easy enough to defend.

  A woman in the guise of a blackbird

  spreads the word

  from its gable end.

  The great stags of Drum Rolach

  start up from a stream that runs

  across a mud shelf.

  From there you may make out

  clay-red Roigne, Mucruime and, no doubt,

  the plain of Moenmag itself.

  Won’t you come for a tour

  of my wooded realm

  with its paths only wild beasts beat?

  Though I know

  you have much more to show,

  my life is quite replete.

  Think of the shaggy limbs

  of a yew tree

  saying its sooth.

  Think of a massive oak

  spreading a green cloak

  by way of a summer booth.

  You may ponder a huge apple tree such

  as you’d find at another ringfort.

  A tree bestowing many gifts.

  When it comes to nuts,

  the hazel trees by my hut

  never give short shrift.

  There are the best of wells

  and lovely waterfalls

  over which to gush.

  The medicinal yew

  and hackberry on which to chew

  are nowhere more lush.

  In the vicinity are goats,

  stags, and hinds,

  pigs that are the next best thing to pets,

  and wild pigs lurking in the scrub,

  the badger sow and her cubs

  in their sett.

  In front of my establishment

  a great host of the countryside peaceably assembles.

  They gather. They gather and fold.

  Meanwhile the dog-fox

  picking its way through the wood in long socks

  is lovely to behold.

  In the face of the quickly prepared repasts

  on offer in my house

  I couldn’t be more devout.

  The water’s superb,

  as are the perennial herbs

  that accompany salmon and trout.

  The rowan or mountain ash.

  The blackthorn and the sloes

  within its scope.

  Acorns in an acorn heap.

  A bunch of bare berry-sheep

  dangling from bare mountain slopes.

  A handful of eggs,

  honey, more beech mast, heath pease

  God’s sent my way.

  There are even more apples to prog,

  cranberries from the bog,

  and berries known as whortle-, bil-, or blae-.

  Beer flavored with bog myrtle.

  A bed of strawberries the only bed

  from which joy is evinced.

  Hawthorn good for a pain in the heart.

  Yew for giving it a start.

  Blackthorn tea for a medicinal rinse.

  How lovely then to quaff a cup

  of hazel mead

  from the very freshest batch.

  To nibble at more acorns

  and blackberries among the flailing thorns

  of the bramble patch.

  In next to no time summer has come round

  with its dense ground cover

  and all it bespeaks.

  The tastes of wild marjoram

  and, near the pond dam,

  blood-cleansing wild leeks.

  Bright-breasted wood pigeons

  will be billing and cooing

  in a lovely rush.

  Over my abode

  the default mode

  of a mistle thrush.

  Bees and beetles,

  their low-level hum

  as if through a screen.

  Brent geese and barnacle geese

  disturbing the peace

  just before Halloween.

  A lithe little linnet

  working his magic

  from the hazel branch.

  It’s on an open door the flock

  of variegated woodpeckers knock.

  They give themselves carte blanche.

  Now white seabirds come flying,

  herons and gulls

  and the sea airs they bruit.

  Far from down in the dumps

  is the grouse’s thump

  through red heather shoots.

  Then the heifer lowing

  in high summer,

  daylight on the gain.

  Life is far from tough

  when we’ve more than enough

  from the bounteous plain.

  The call of the wind

  through a wood’s wickerwork.

  Clouds that somehow prevail.

  A river that falls

  through rocky walls

  on such a pleasant scale.

  Beautiful, too, the pine trees

  that give me music

  without my making a pitch.

  However wealthy you may be

  Christ has left me

  no less rich.

  Though you delight

  in having more treasures

  than might easily have sufficed,

  I’m quite content

  with what is lent

  me by that self-same Christ.

  I have none of the aggravation

  or din of battle

  by which your heartstrings are constantly cut,

  only gratitude to the Lord

  for the gifts he affords

  me in my hut.

  KING GUAIRE

  I would give my kingdom

  and all that’s due

  to me from Colmán for the rest of my days

  to live, Marban, as you.

  FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA: “DEATH”

  What a tremendous effort they all put into it!

  The horse does its damnedest

  to become a dog.

  The dog tries so hard to become a swallow.

  The swallow busies itself with becoming a bee.

  The bee does its level best to become a horse.

  As for the horse,

  just look at the barbed arrow it draws from the rose,

  that faint rose lifting from its underlip.

  The rose, meanwhile,

  what a slew of lights and calls

  are bound up in the living sugar of its stem.

  The sugar, in turn,

  those daggers it conjures while standing watch.

  The little daggers themselves,

  such a moon minus horse stalls, such nakedness,

  such robust and ruddy skin as they’re bent upon.

  And I, perched on the gable end,

  what a blazing angel I aim at being, and am.

  The arch made of plaster, however—

  how huge, how invisible, then how small it is,

  without the least striving.

  A PILLAR

  Of the two on an Elizabethan stage

  meant to support the heavens, one’s been itemized

  as missing since the flit from Shoreditch

  left it high and dry

  and safe from our cutthroat Doge.

  Once it propped up the drunken sailor on a mast

  ready with every nod to tumble down,

  once obscured a lady in a doublet

  yet to be revealed as the long-lost twin

  of Starveling or Snug or Sly.

  Many an imp from the Forest of Arden

  who scaled it with a catapult

  or pail of birdlime made from holly bark

  to trap a mistle thrush or canary

  ha
s returned a confirmed empiric,

  extending the use of birdlime to the nether eye

  and the bugle hung in an invisible baldric

  as a cure for gonorrhea

  while poling still across the Thames-Isis.

  There we played ducks and drakes

  with our cutthroat Dogberry and all those so-and-sos

  determined to try

  us at the next assizes.

  Our conversation about the intrigue

  in which the lad dressed as a lady dressed as a lad

  who proved the ferret

  to your own coney burrow and took such delight

  in being singled out as a double-dealing spy

  by both Old Gobbo and Lancelot

  must have been overheard

  by Snug in the shadow of this very pillar …

  Its shadow lengthened even as

  the sun struggled to raise a beam from the blur

  and we fell in with the hue and cry

  of men-at-arms on the trail of the old King’s player

  who stole from house to house

  in an effort to put himself beyond the reach

  of tub-fast and mercuric sulfide.

  Now we take comfort in this one-legged arch

  beyond which the sky

  is leveling a charge

  of which we may never be absolved.

  CATAMARAN

  Between Dominica and Martinique

  we go in search of sperm whales, listening for their tink-tink-tink

  on a hydrophone

  hooked up to a minispeaker. A prisoner’s tap

  on a heating pipe …

  The one faint hope by which he’s driven.

  My son is reading Lord of the Flies. I can think of that book

  only as the dog-eared manuscript Charles Monteith would pick

  out of the slush pile at Faber’s.

  I’m pretty sure dear Charles recognized

  a version of himself in Piggy. The same prep-school anguish.

  Same avuncularity. Same avoirdupois.

  Now I imagine lying by my dead wife

  just as a sperm whale lies by its dead mate as if

  it might truly be said to mourn.

  A corruption of the Tamil term for “two logs

  lashed together with rope or the like,”

  the word we use is “catamaran.”

  NEAR THE GRACE OF GOD NAIL SALON

  In the slave castle at Cape Coast

  I saw slaves pushed from pillar to whipping post

  on their way out of Ghana

  by the Door of No Return.

  I suppose any plain-backed pipit might learn

  to sound the vox humana

  from its organ reed, given how a woman may take wing

  above an open sewer and sing,

  making not only her own spirits quicken

  but gladdening the heart of a boy who trots in her wake.