the pennywhistle and the plenilunar

  pigskin of a Lambeg drum,

  be they sending off a White Star liner

  or a little tramp.

  LOS DISSIDENTES

  Coming to anything late in the day has an allure

  all its own. The river plummets here with such aplomb

  it brings back Slim Pickens’s holler

  as he bronco-busts the H-bomb

  in Dr. Strangelove. We like it when things are stacked

  against us, when beavers are showing

  initiative at the beaver dam. We take comfort from the fact

  that after years of scenery-chewing

  Rockets Redglare thoroughly upped

  his profile with his role in Down by Law.

  Though the file

  is almost certainly corrupt,

  we can still hope to salvage something from the raw

  footage of the waterfall.

  REQUIRED FIELDS

  Then we could ride all day and yet

  not reach the farthest edge of our demesne,

  its slow handclap of grouse

  impatient for the mist-wreathed

  curtain of the moor

  to rise. Remember the beech

  where we were filed

  under our noms de plume,

  the chestnut tree where a soul was known to roost

  before it was set in linotype

  or its path laid

  in herringbone? For a second asterisk

  we’d use a dagger, then double daggers

  for the third footnote.

  There was a time when accountants took into account

  our dim view of paying tax.

  Now so much else dims

  while the phonograph bends its ear

  toward the ice trumpet. Yes. The ice trumpet

  recorded in the Ice Hotel

  that we now favor over Strauss.

  An impasto sheep

  well used to some rule of thumb

  poses with a donkey-easel

  against a hemmed-in sky.

  Along the fraying torrent

  that itself runs along the stage

  the deerhounds strut and fret.

  Then we had something like free rein

  to laugh with the half-crazed maid from Die Fledermaus

  who laughed till her bosom heaved

  uncontrollably. The horse manure

  smelling of bleach,

  how artfully that was piled!

  I think of the stable groom

  turned tour guide who’s still known to boost

  his minimum wage

  by dressing up as a bit of a swell.

  They found a credit-card receipt for petrol used to douse

  the barn and set fire to a Jeep.

  The stable walls were opus spicatum.

  Everybody knows that teazle

  is the prototype of the hook and eye.

  It was that stable groom, I’ll warrant,

  who made a strumpet

  of not only Colonel Knipe’s

  but our own kitchen maid—

  the one with the “slipped disc.”

  My gelding once again took the head staggers

  just as I was taking a straw vote

  as to whether I should mount

  a campaign. Someone brought an ax

  to bear on why we’d carved our pseudonyms

  on a tree. Was it for fear

  we might someday be reconciled

  to the idea we can maintain

  this tumbledown old manor house

  only because we’ve bequeathed

  it to the nation? As it is, guided tour after guided tour

  brings home to each

  of us how we’ve let

  go of all but seven rooms

  to which, we overhear, we are “reduced.”

  TO MARKET, TO MARKET

  1

  I’m sure one of the reasons J. J. Astor had been under such duress

  was that he recently leaned over to the lady seated next to him at a dinner party

  and wiped his hands on her muslin dress …

  Maybe he’d had a little too much of a Bordeaux

  run up by Phelan or Lynch,

  two Irish chemists vying for parity

  with Boyle and Beaufort. Treacle bread and cheese in cheesecloth, that’s the lunch

  my father carries as he stands in line

  in this predawn dark, waiting for a mower-laden truck to launch

  him beyond the realm of the Guatemalans

  with whom he tries to keep abreast. Their Igloo coolers are packed with beans and rice

  in anticipation of their being hired for the day by Princeton Complete Lawn.

  2

  After a day of shouldering bales of cauliflowers in the pouring rain

  my back was itself a broad leaf, rainwater coursing down the groove of its mid-vein.

  NOAH & SONS

  1

  A solitary ewe stood guard

  like a widow in her mantle

  at the entrance to the graveyard.

  One line ran all the way from my pommel through my cantle

  to the Massey Ferguson baler

  while lovers screamed with tumult harsh

  and a converted whaler

  sank slowly into the alder marsh.

  As we cantered across the stubble

  we managed to double

  back on ourselves like hares

  fleeing a primal scene

  to which we’re bound to repair

  as long as yellow + blue = green.

  2

  For “ewe” read “yew.”

  For “baler” read “thrasher.”

  For “retina” read “retinue.”

  For “Ashur” read “Asher.”

  For “fathead” read “minnow.”

  For “shame” read “Shem.”

  For “window” read “winnow.”

  For “bract” read “stem.”

  For “missile” read “Missal.”

  For “darnel“read “thistle.”

  For “skewered” read “skewed.”

  For “hart” read “chart.”

  For “Freud” read “feud.”

  For “dirt” read “dart.”

  3

  Now we were galloping across the swamp

  showing little or no decorum,

  little or no pomp.

  This wasn’t the first time we’d had three or four jorums

  too many. For years the heavens had pummeled

  us not only with regulation hail

  but blow bolts fledged with the comal

  tufts of bulrush or cattail.

  It seemed marsh elder still made for a blowgun

  that raised itself like its own slogan

  while “Bring it on”

  was the rallying cry

  of the thistles now at daggers drawn

  that had once seen eye to eye.

  PAUL MULDOON: “POMPEII”

  1

  On the street a boy still mends

  a puncture on his bike,

  paying out an inner tube

  from a tire

  and keeping an eye out for a ripple

  in the plastic basin.

  Like trying to cajole

  a red-bellied snake

  from the hood of an Oldsmobile

  on which it basks.

  Jayne’s rubberized bathing costume.

  How that costume clung.

  2

  It was during the Festival of the Kalends

  we’d seen something of a spike

  in the ratings when an ice cube

  had all but set fire

  to Jayne’s right nipple.

  A pneumatic caisson

  was used less for digging coal

  than tunnels. Part of my mistake

  was that roses and steel

  may both be termed “damask.”

  Then there’s the rose that blooms

  on a coal miner’s lung.

  3

  A bridge builder will get the bends

  if his coworkers hike

  him too suddenly. Her trip to Jiffy Lube

  had Jayne aspire

  to a McDonald’s Triple.

  A sex game involving asphyxiation

  conjured by bubbles from a pinprick hole.

  The surface those bubbles break

  likely to reveal

  itself only in the sense a mask

  reveals who’s lain with whom.

  The tire’s black dog. The inner tube’s dog tongue.

  CAMILLE PISSARRO: APPLE PICKING AT ERAGNY-SUR-EPTE

  Christ may as well have been hanged

  for a sheep as a lamb,

  given how the so-called panking pole

  loosening a dam

  of apples lodged between boles

  is used by one of the work gang

  to pierce his side. His garment

  strewn on the grass

  is a shadow without a seam.

  Two of the women grub in the morass

  for anything they might deem

  salvageable after attacks by varmints

  of various stripes. A third stares at his rib cage,

  stifling her gasp

  in anticipation of another gush of blood

  and water. The centurion grasps

  his pole more tightly as if the flash flood

  of apples might be about to gauge

  its own significance.

  That middle-distant horse asleep between the shafts

  is at least absolved of the mounting block.

  Given the successive grafts

  of noble scions upon noble stocks,

  when I glance

  from my hotel window

  even I discern

  a possibility

  I might too readily have spurned—

  that any of these rangy, raw-boned trees

  is the one I will turn into.

  DIRTY DATA

  The bog is fenced up there on Slieve Gullion, Slieve Gullion where the bracken leaf

  still lies behind the Celto-Iberian sword design

  adopted by the Romans. Pontius Pilate’s poised with his handkerchief

  at the parting spine

  where the contestants snort and stamp.

  That’s right, Lew, the dealing

  men from Crossmaglen put whiskey in our piñon tea. A hurricane lamp

  shines from a shieling

  like an undercover star. The goshawk nests in lodgepole and ponderosa pine

  while a Mescalero girl twists

  osiers into a basket that does indeed imitate

  what passes for life, given how ring wants nothing more than to intertwine

  with ring. The mountain’s covered in heavy schists.

  The streams themselves are muddied.

  The dog is tense. The dog is tense the day Ben Hourihane

  falls fuel of the new Roman turbine,

  Little Miss Sally hisself, tense enough to set off a chain

  of events that will see Ben mine

  warehouse after warehouse of schlock

  and link him via a Roman warship

  to a hell-for-leather chariot race at Antioch.

  Sooner or later Messala will need a lot more than a double hip

  replacement while Ben will barely chafe

  at the bit. That’s right, Messala, an amputation saw!

  The doctor is cocking an ear to your chest’s tumble-de-drum

  like a man trying to open a safe.

  To add to the confusion, Ben’s still trying to crack a lobster claw

  with a lobster claw made of titanium.

  Ben has somehow been playing scuffle on his washboard abs

  while eating all that treif.

  It looks like 1961. Or ’65. No time before a few squatters from the prefabs

  in Dungannon morph into the crowd the paratroopers strafe

  on Bloody Sunday. A golden dolphin marks the lap run by each new

  Roman tribune. Whitelaw. Pym. Rees. Mason.

  Atkins. Prior. Hurd. King. Brooke. Mayhew.

  Dense, too, the fog when each Halloween Ben ducks in an enamel basin

  for an enamel apple

  and comes up with a botched job.

  Such is the integrity of their kraal the horses will find no slot

  in the funeral cortege of Winston Churchill from the Royal Chapel

  to Woodstock. As his carriage passes the dolphins bob

  for a commoner’s mere 19- rather than a no-stops-pulled 21-gun salute.

  Along the Thames, meanwhile, even the cranes will bow

  and scrape as the coffin passes the Isle of Dogs and the citizenry grapple

  with their sense of loss. The Havengore’s prow

  will no more shake off a water dapple

  than we’ll concede we’ve been excluded from a race.

  It looks as if Little Miss Messala, played by a Belfast boy, will clutch

  at the idea he might drive a tea-chest bass

  to victory. Ben paces the afterdeck in the knowledge that as much

  as we have sheltered them

  our children will now feel obliged to shelter us

  from some harshness we’re not fit to bear. They’ll glom onto the gliomach

  shut out of its lorica segmentata while expecting us to condemn

  wholesale the tattooed gulpin, the tatty glamour-puss,

  not to speak of the other stuff they know we’ll find hard to stomach.

  That’s right, Lew, you’ll have Ben pace the afterdeck of a war galley

  to which he’s been consigned for having made an ad hominem

  remark about a minister who banned a civil rights rally.

  Though the top hem

  of my childhood bedroom curtain’s concealed by a pelmet

  it clearly has the makings of a Roman cape.

  Take the idea of a bird nesting in a bicycle helmet

  some kid’s hung by the garage door. The nest follows the nape

  no less intently than the truth twisters and tub thumpers

  will relocate your Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ

  from Judaea to an army outpost

  near Jonesborough or Cullaville. These wouldn’t be the first parachute jumpers

  to have been enticed

  into a honeypot and then by honeybees beset.

  Sometimes the elephant in the room’s the single war elephant

  Caesar loosed on the Britons one bank-holiday weekend the traffic was bumper-

  to-bumper. To add to the confusion, the evidence is scant

  that the Hourihanes were ever actually reduced to eating Lumpers

  in the 1830s. They may well have lived in the nether regions

  of Tyrone where the Famine wouldn’t hit so hard. That’s right, Lew, they weren’t swept

  underfoot by the Ninth Legion

  along with the rest of the evidence. Why did someone try to intercept

  your letter to Billy the Kid? In 1933, Seosamh Mac Grianna would follow word for word

  your purple-inked prose

  as he rendered Ben Hur into Gaelic for An Gúm.

  To add to the confusion the bird

  has single-mindedly begun to transpose

  materials from an abandoned site—cloak wool, horsehair, an eagle plume.

  That’s right, Lew, what we’re looking at is a feather from a hawk or bald eagle

  worn by the girl to whom you yourself transferred

  your affections shortly after you were appointed to that regal (or viceregal)

  post in New Mexico. Many of us remember how you’d gird

  your loins for a three-day fact-finding mission

  with Willie Whitelaw. That’s when we first saw Messala twitch

  through the partition

  in a cowshed where he’d been tortured as a snitch

  by four Mescaleros. Messala wouldn’t have been the first soldier to marry

  a local girl. Nor would he have been the first to spill

  his guts under interrogation. Did Christ offer Ben water from an 1858 army canteen

  or the 1874 model? It was on the rifle range at Barry’s

  amusement park that Ben may first have thought of countering the shoot-to-kill

  policy by which Billy the Kid was gunned down.

  Ben knows a Barrett semiautomatic rifle fitted with a Vari-X sight has got the job done

  at distances of over a mile. There’s really no way to parry

  that infrared light. As to who masterminded the bomb run,

  the records are almost as fragmentary

  as the tile that clattered down from the roof of Ben’s council flat

  and spooked the prefect’s mount.

  The Lincoln County War, in which you tried to intervene, was another tit-for-tat

  war fought between Prods and Papes. The body count

  should include the glamour-puss Haya Harareet

  as Esther. It must have been during the process of data capture

  there was some mash-up of the “coyote brush”

  and her little “pleat.”

  Then there’s Cathy O’Donnell, who plays Tirzah, “she who brings rapture,”

  and on whom Messala might once have had a crush.

  The shieling on Slieve Gullion. Oíche Shamhna. Messala’s head shoved underwater

  in a bucket. Hands tied behind him. A little meet and greet

  with the Magna Mater.

  Divination by fruit and nuts. As for the suggestion that the BNM stamped on those peat

  briquettes stands not for Bord na Móna

  but Banca Naţionalaǎ a Moldovei, that’s got to be a load of balderdash.

  It comes as no surprise the Roman goddess Pomona

  oversees a cache

  of linen-factory data, albeit incomplete,

  written on onionskin. It turns out that Ben Hur is a patronymic

  meaning “Son of White Linen.” “Ben” like the “Mac” in Seosamh Mac Grianna,

  erstwhile political prisoner. A Loyalist gunman has been known to yell “Trick or Treat!”

  as he opens fire with a semiautomatic. The dolphins continue to mimic

  the obeisance of the dock cranes.

  That’s right, Lew, the obeisance of the dock cranes seems to mark another lap

  of the Macedonian pirate fleet

  around the Cinecittà tank. Why not fit a motion-sensitive booby trap

  to the Canary Wharf bomb? A Pape had as much chance of winning a council seat

  as a bird does of representing the abandoned site.

 

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