One Thousand Things Worth Knowing Page 4

  She glances back to where the boy (her son?) makes

  like that mangy chicken

  shooting its cuffs because its suit’s so hot.

  It being noon, she hasn’t much of a shot

  at casting a shadow,

  even though she carries home

  a mess of fish in a basket set on a blue latex foam

  mattress pad no

  self-respecting fish would be seen dead on.

  Near the Grace of God Nail Salon

  she pauses to take the basket

  from her head,

  as though to ponder if she might choose, instead

  of a fish-shaped casket,

  a casket in the shape of a beer bottle or speedboat.

  The mangy chicken, plus a mangy goat,

  chime in with the plain-backed pipit

  to celebrate her setting the basket back atop

  her head as she draws level with the Vote for Jesus Wig Shop.

  If there’s a balance now I’m inclined to tip it

  in favor of the boy who comes back double quick

  to seize my wrist despite its being slick

  with suntan lotion.

  After his recent brush with mange

  he, too, is able to rearrange

  himself with almost as little commotion—

  with almost as little to-do—

  as the military coup

  that ousted Kwame Nkrumah.

  Now I see that his entire outfit, from his football shirt

  to his sneakers shining in the dirt,

  comes courtesy of Puma.

  A GIRAFFE

  Though her lorgnette

  and evening gloves

  suggest she’s made for the role

  of an opera buff

  singing along with the score,

  her mouth’s out of sync

  with her own overdub.

  A giraffe that flubbed

  her lines coming back to drink

  just a little more

  of the bubbly stuff

  from the dried-out mud hole

  in which a reflection of

  her upper body’s already set.

  DROMEDARIES AND DUNG BEETLES

  An eye-level fleck of straw in the mud wall

  is almost as good as gold …

  I’ve ventured into this piss-poor urinal

  partly to escape the wail

  of thirty milch camels with their colts

  as they’re readied for our trek

  across the dunes, partly because I’ve guzzled

  three glasses of the diuretic

  gunpowder tea the Tuareg

  hold in such esteem. Their mostly business casual

  attire accented by a flamboyant

  blue or red nylon grab rope

  round their lower jaws, dromedaries point

  to a 9-to-5 life of knees bent

  in the service of fetching carboys

  and carpetbags from A to B across the scarps.

  Think Boyne coracles

  bucking from wave to wave. Think scarab

  beetles rolling their scrips

  of dung to a gabfest. These dromedary-gargoyles

  are at once menacing and meek

  as, railing against their drivers’ kicks and clicks,

  they fix their beautiful-ugly mugs

  on their own Meccas.

  The desert sky was so clear last night the galaxies

  could be seen to pulse …

  The dromedaries were having a right old chin-wag,

  each musing on its bolus.

  Every so often one would dispense some pills

  that turned out to be generic

  sheep or goat. The dung beetles set great store

  not by the bitter cud

  nor the often implausible Histories

  of Herodotus but the stars

  they use to guide

  themselves over the same sand dunes

  as these thirty milch camels

  and their colts. They, too, make a continuous

  line through Algeria and Tunisia.

  Dung beetles have been known to positively gambol

  on the outskirts of Zagora, a boom-

  town where water finds it hard not to gush

  over the date palms.

  Despite the clouds of pumice

  above Marrakesh even I might find my way to Kesh,

  in the ancient barony of Lurg,

  thanks to Cassiopeia

  and her self-regard. Think of how there lurks

  in almost all of us a weakness for the allegorical.

  Think of a Moroccan swallow’s last gasp

  near the wattle-and-daub oppidum

  where one of my kinsmen clips

  the manes of a groaning chariot team …

  Think of Private Henry Muldoon putting his stamp

  on the mud of Gallipoli

  on August 8, 1915. It appears

  he worked as a miner at Higham Colliery

  before serving in the Lancasters and the 8th Welsh Pioneers.

  His somewhat pronounced ears

  confirm his place in the family gallery.

  “It’s only a blink…” my father used to say. “Only a blink.”

  I myself seem to have developed the gumption

  to stride manfully out of a neo-Napoleonic

  latrine and play my part in the march on Casablanca

  during the North African campaign.

  SOME PITFALLS AND HOW TO AVOID THEM

  for Asher

  Stratocumulus, or cumulonimbus, the clouds have made such strides

  in crossing the Rockies

  they’ve now caught up with us. A diet of buffalo ragout

  will leave anyone “in straits”

  sooner rather than later. That the glister in a Port-a-John

  on a parking lot near Bennigan’s

  in Fargo, North Dakota, turned out to be a pine cone

  doesn’t mean the Cheyenne

  were wrong to take things at face value.

  Bear in mind that “calomel” looks a lot like “chamomile”

  to the guy trying to compile

  a camping checklist. Given the near certainty they’ll fall foul

  of some infection of the blood,

  snakebite, sundry blisters and boils,

  syphilis, dysentery, piles,

  and plain old costiveness, Lewis and Clark plied

  their entire squad

  with Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills,

  the upshot being the Corps of Discovery would loosen their bowels

  by thunderclaps and quicksilver-scoots

  through random pine scrub and clumps of river birch.

  Now we’ve pulled into the Samurai

  Sushi Bar and ordered two Godzilla rolls. Bear in mind that Zimri

  was king of Israel only as long as it took to purge

  himself of himself. Who would have guessed

  that J.M.W. Turner was perfecting his ability to scumble

  cumulonimbus and stratocumulus

  precisely as Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific coast

  and built Fort Clatsop? The Cheyenne chewed the gum

  of both ponderosa

  and lodgepole pines. Bear in mind how our fireside banter

  may be lost to the generations to come

  but their native scouts

  will still be able to follow our route across America

  by the traces of mercury

  in our scats.

  CUBA (2)

  I’m hanging with my daughter in downtown Havana.

  She’s worried people think she’s my mail-order bride.

  It might be the Anseo tattooed on her ankle.

  It might be the tie-in with that poem of mine.

  The ’59 Buicks. The ’59 Chevys.

  The ’59 Studebakers with their whitewalled wheels.

  The rain-bleached streets have been put through a mangle.

  The sugar mills, too, are feeling the squeeze.

  We touch on how Ireland will be inundated

  long before the nil-nil draw.

  Che Guevara’s father was one of the Galway Lynches.

  Now a genetically engineered catfish can crawl

  on its belly like an old-school guerrilla.

  Maybe a diminished seventh isn’t the note

  a half-decent revolution should end on?

  The poor with their hands out for “pencils” and “soap”?

  Hopped up though I am on caffeine

  I’ve suffered all my life from post-traumatic fatigue.

  Even a world-class sleeper like Rip Van Winkle

  was out of it for only twenty years.

  A fillet of the fenny

  cobra may yet fold into a blood-pressure drug.

  A passion for marijuana

  may yet be nipped in the bud.

  Some are here for a nose job. Some a torn meniscus.

  The profits from health tourism have been salted away.

  The blue scorpion takes the sting from one cancer.

  Ovarian may yet leave us unfazed.

  Hemingway’s sun hat is woven from raffia.

  He’s tried everything to stop the rot.

  He’s cut everything back to the bare essentials.

  His ’55 Chrysler’s in the shop.

  We’ll sit with Hemingway through yet another evening

  of trying to stay off the rum.

  I’m running down the list of my uncles.

  It was Uncle Pat who was marked by a gun.

  Our friends Meyer Lansky and the Jewish mafia

  built the Riviera as a gambling club.

  Had it not been for the time differential

  Uncle Arnie might have taken a cut
.

  The best baseball bats are turned from hibiscus.

  They’re good against people who get in your way.

  The best poems, meanwhile, give the answers

  to questions only they have raised.

  We touch on Bulat and Yevgeny,

  two Russian friends who’ve since left town.

  The Cuban ground iguana

  is actually quite thin on the ground.

  The cigars we lit up on Presidents’ Avenue

  have won gold medals in the cigar games.

  Now it seems a cigar may twinkle

  all the more as the light fails.

  My daughter’s led me through Hemingway’s villa

  to a desk round which dusk-drinkers crowd.

  She insists the Anseo on her Achilles tendon

  represents her being in the here and now.

  The cattle egret is especially elated

  that a plow may still be yoked to an ox.

  Others sigh for the era of three-martini lunches

  and the Martini-Henry single-shot.

  When will we give Rothstein and Lansky and their heavies

  the collective heave?

  In Ireland we need to start now to untangle

  the rhetoric of 2016.

  The Riviera’s pool is shaped like a coffin.

  So much has been submerged here since the Bay of Pigs.

  Maybe that’s why the buildings are wrinkled?

  Maybe that’s why the cars have fins?

  TUSKER

  Given that she does nothing by halves

  it was hard to see how the wunderkind surgeon from the burn unit would salve

  her conscience while trying to keep cool

  in the face of a barstool

  covered in a whale’s foreskin. A yacht on which the swimming pool

  converts to a dance floor? It was Aristotle Onassis

  who rescued that concept, just as he reclaimed the word “nauseous”

  for the shipping industry. The rings in their noses

  will prevent overindulgence in beech mast

  in a high percentage of hogs but to help them stand fast

  against worms a garlic-and-molasses supplement is unsurpassed.

  I was feeling such bonhomie

  this morning partly because of the burn unit phenom’s

  evident compassion for the bonham

  she was about to sweal

  over a Bunsen burner in anticipation of what this might reveal

  about the capacity of singed skin to heal.

  Last night Hippocrates had prescribed pig fat and vinegar

  wrapped around the middle finger

  to another freethinker

  who’d abandoned (or been abandoned by?) the god

  who once clawed

  his way out from under six feet of his native sod.

  It’s inevitable that at least some of the cream and treacle

  fed to a tusker will trickle

  from his jaws like blood from Dracula.

  I was feeling so expansive today at the pig mart

  also because I’d met another Large White boar with just one moving part

  and vowed to donate to him, if not my heart,

  then at least a heart valve.

  HONEY

  Our plane takes hill upon hill long since cleared of pines. The flash

  of matching lakelets. Weather and more weather.

  The copilot points to at least one benefit

  of felling pines for warship keels, namely how the heather

  that pits itself against an old saw pit

  and fills in the great gash

  of a logging road also sustains our friends the honeybees.

  The coroner at the scene of the crash

  found the seams of Buddy Holly’s jacket of yellow faux leather

  “split almost full-length” and his skull also “split.”

  Buddy’s personal effects amounted to a pair of cufflinks together

  with the top of a ballpoint pen and, barely within his remit,

  the $193.00 in cash

  from which the coroner deducted $11.65 in fees.

  SEVEN SELFIES FROM THE CHTEAU D’IF

  1

  I too was flung into a cell so dark

  I’d hunger for the black and moldy bread

  that all too soon defined my comfort zone.

  I cast my mind back for some ill-judged phrase,

  unguarded look, circumstance I’d misread,

  some vibe I gave at which some took offense.

  2

  I too have heard another scratch his mark

  with such conviction as might match my own.

  3

  I too was schooled by a high-minded monk

  who ruled the world-book must be read aloud.

  4

  It took both winter freeze and summer freeze

  to yield growth rings so uniformly dense

  my tone brought back a Stradivarius—

  demure-insistent, delicate-immense.

  5

  I too switched with a dead man in his bunk

  and stitched myself into his burlap shroud.

  6

  I too have heard ghoulish pallbearers scoff

  while I’ve kept cool and clutched my toothbrush shank.

  7

  I too am hurtling down with such great force

  it’s even harder to keep playing dead

  while knowing in my bones I shouldn’t tense

  myself for impact. Soon I will slit the cloth

  and, having freed one arm, then free my head

  and hope to surface far from where I sank.

  THE FIRING SQUAD

  I am going to tell you something I never but once let out of the bag before and that was just after I reached London and before I had begun to value myself for what I was worth. It is a very damaging secret and you may not thank me for taking you into it when I tell you that I have often wished I could be sure that the other sharer of it had perished in the war. It is this: The poet in me died nearly ten years ago.

  —ROBERT FROST TO LOUIS UNTERMEYER, MAY 4, 1916

  I am very happy I am dying for the glory of God and the honour of Ireland.

  —JOSEPH MARY PLUNKETT TO FATHER SEBASTIAN, MAY 4, 1916

  Something I never but once let on

  is that I am as ready to be hanged, drawn,

  and quartered as the Blessed Oliver, as ready as his sober-suited

  descendant, Joseph Mary Plunkett,

  to be shot—all the more so if I’ve married my beloved Grace

  only hours before. Like many of my race,

  I’ve come to see English plantain as a flatfooted

  weed terminating in an oblongoid

  spike of flowers like the head of a mace.

  It tends to establish itself in the least likely place,

  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 dunnock

  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