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There are times when all the chutzpa I can muster isn't enough, fug and bluster all I can do, and damned if it doesn't just stand there, legs straddling a berm of washboard dust-ruts and in late noon sun stare me blue in the face: lord, we could almost trade places, my back strained by the weight of those great bone wings, my tongue itching for lily root. And musk, lord, the pheromones, a day so sweet with elderberry's too rank fume I could die twice over snuffing. While the truck mumbles and a trout spanks the cooler, I almost outdo myself. But reason, that too-convenient shortcut, creeps back, if only so far: the rest as we say is silence, dust and the sputter of flies and when lumbering to go it pauses and throws me its last worst look its sorrow is Christ's, dewlap jeweled, a beatitude of moss.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations For Grace Bulmer Bowers Grace Bulmer Bowers Elizabeth Bishop’s aunt From narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides where the bay leaves the sea twice a day and takes the herrings long rides, where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay coming in, the bay not at home; where, silted red, sometimes the sun sets facing a red sea, and others, veins veins Used as a verb: to extend over or mark with lines, as in the manner of veins the flats’ lavender, rich mud in burning rivulets rivulets A small stream or brook ; on red, gravelly roads, down rows of sugar maples, past clapboard farmhouses and neat, clapboard churches, bleached, ridged as clamshells, past twin silver birches, through late afternoon a bus journeys west, the windshield flashing pink, pink glancing off of metal, brushing the dented flank of blue, beat-up enamel; down hollows, up rises, and waits, patient, while a lone traveller gives kisses and embraces to seven relatives and a collie supervises. Goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dog. The bus starts. The light grows richer; the fog, shifting, salty, thin, comes closing in. Its cold, round crystals form and slide and settle in the white hens’ feathers, in gray glazed cabbages, on the cabbage roses and lupins lupins A tall, flowering plant (Lupinus) in the legume family; its seeds (lupin beans) have been used as food like apostles apostles A plant native to Brazil with large, fragrant white and purple flowers ; the sweet peas cling to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences; bumblebees creep inside the foxgloves foxgloves A colorful perennial flower, with cup-shaped buds. , and evening commences. One stop at Bass River Bass River All locations in Nova Scotia near the Bay of Fundy . Then the Economies Economies Locations (Lower Economy, Middle Economy, and Upper Economy) in Nova Scotia near the Bay of Fundy — Lower, Middle, Upper; Five Islands Five Islands All locations in Nova Scotia near the Bay of Fundy , Five Houses Five Houses All locations in Nova Scotia near the Bay of Fundy , where a woman shakes a tablecloth out after supper. A pale flickering. Gone. The Tantramar marshes Tantramar marshes On the Chignecto Isthmus connecting Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Canada and the smell of salt hay. An iron bridge trembles and a loose plank rattles but doesn’t give way. On the left, a red light swims through the dark: a ship’s port lantern. Two rubber boots show, illuminated, solemn. A dog gives one bark. A woman climbs in with two market bags, brisk, freckled, elderly. “A grand night. Yes, sir, all the way to Boston.” She regards us amicably. Moonlight as we enter the New Brunswick woods, hairy, scratchy, splintery; moonlight and mist caught in them like lamb’s wool on bushes in a pasture. The passengers lie back. Snores. Some long sighs. A dreamy divagation divagations Wanderings begins in the night, a gentle, auditory, slow hallucination.... In the creakings and noises, an old conversation —not concerning us, but recognizable, somewhere, back in the bus: Grandparents’ voices uninterruptedly talking, in Eternity: names being mentioned, things cleared up finally; what he said, what she said, who got pensioned pensioned Dismissed from employment, typically because of age or health; paid a pension. ; deaths, deaths and sicknesses; the year he remarried; the year (something) happened. She died in childbirth. That was the son lost when the schooner foundered schooner foundered A ship that has sunk or filled with water . He took to drink. Yes. She went to the bad. When Amos began to pray even in the store and finally the family had to put him away. “Yes ...” that peculiar affirmative. “Yes ...” A sharp, indrawn breath, half groan, half acceptance, that means “Life’s like that. We know it(also death).” Talking the way they talked in the old featherbed, peacefully, on and on, dim lamplight in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shawl. Now, it’s all right now even to fall asleep just as on all those nights. —Suddenly the bus driver stops with a jolt, turns off his lights. A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms, rather, in the middle of the road. It approaches; it sniffs at the bus’s hot hood. Towering, antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house (or, safe as houses safe as houses Totally safe ). A man’s voice assures us “Perfectly harmless....” Some of the passengers exclaim in whispers, childishly, softly, “Sure are big creatures.” “It’s awful plain.” “Look! It’s a she!” Taking her time, she looks the bus over, grand, otherworldly. Why, why do we feel (we all feel) this sweet sensation of joy? “Curious creatures,” says our quiet driver, rolling his r’s. “Look at that, would you.” Then he shifts gears. For a moment longer, by craning backward, the moose can be seen on the moonlit macadam macadam Road, pavement ; then there’s a dim smell of moose, an acrid acrid Pungent, irritating smell of gasoline.

Consider the rip for a mouth, the rip in the crotch, the hank of hair, consider the flair for ill-fortune, the empty stare, the done deal with sorrow, the rich and rare nest-egg of dreams, the share and share alike in matters of loss, the payments in kind, the liking for blind bets, for truth or dare; consider the threadbare get up, the make-up beyond repair, the tin-tack teeth, consider the dungeon voice wanting nothing more than bare house-room, and nothing less than hand-in-glove, a pigeon pair given over to make and mend, to touch and go, to wear and tear, and all it takes is this: forswear flint and fire, stay silent, be white on white, live in dead air.

You were never a man in the television sense of the word. I was never a wild Slinky in the sex-club sense of a toy. You were never a tobacco store in the Modernist sense of a trope. I was never a snowdrop in the candy store sense of a treat. You were never Day-glo in the fashionista sense of a scarf. I was never withyouallthetime in the username sense of a self. You were never a strumpet in the toothache sense of an insult. I was never a tooting horn in the childhood sense of a game. You were never a hole-in-my-heart in the country singer sense of a vista. I was never a paper doll in the pyromaniac sense of a pal. You were never a parenthesis in the phony secret sense of a sign. I was never red lipstick in the pulp novel sense of a threat. You were never a word in the mystic sense of an obstacle. I was never a shaking castanet in the midnight sense of a song.

D: The Dreadful Dinotherium he Will have to do his best for D. The early world observed with awe His back, indented like a saw. His look was gay, his voice was strong; His tail was neither short nor long; His trunk, or elongated nose, Was not so large as some suppose; His teeth, as all the world allows, Were graminivorous, like a cow's. He therefore should have wished to pass Long peaceful nights upon the Grass, But being mad the brute preferred To roost in branches, like a bird. 1 A creature heavier than a whale, You see at once, could hardly fail To suffer badly when he slid And tumbled (as he always did). His fossil, therefore, comes to light All broken up: and serve him right. MORAL If you were born to walk the ground, Remain there; do not fool around. E stands for Egg. MORAL The Moral of this verse Is applicable to the Young. Be terse. K for the Klondyke, a Country of Gold, Where the winters are often excessively cold; Where the lawn every morning is covered with rime, And skating continues for years at a time. Do you think that a Climate can conquer the grit Of the Sons of the West? Not a bit! Not a bit! When the weather looks nippy, the bold Pioneers Put on two pairs of Stockings and cover their ears, And roam through the drear Hyperborean dales With a vast apparatus of Buckets and Pails; Or wander through wild Hyperborean glades With Hoes, Hammers, Pickaxes, Mattocks and Spades. There are some who give rise to exuberant mirth By turning up nothing but bushels of earth, While those who have little cause excellent fun By attempting to pilfer from those who have none. At times the reward they will get for their pains Is to strike very tempting auriferous veins; Or, a shaft being sunk for some miles in the ground, Not infrequently nuggets of value are found. They bring us the gold when their labours are ended, And we—after thanking them prettily—spend it. MORAL Just you work for Humanity, never you mind If Humanity seems to have left you behind.

After the first course, your corsage         flatlines into beautiful convulsions          It sprouts wings, thorns, claws its way up your arm to swallow you goosebump          by goosebump          There is a moment when resurrection devours the most devout heart          Deep blue           the ink pen veins blow up behind my eyes        Patron saint of stifling anger on the rocks        Patron saint of politely            melting into this tomato        soup a spoonful at a time & we speak        in fortune cookie all night               The next dish, a ventilator       An IV        dripping into something already dead       I order two specials Make the pain remind you of the one who signed your tiny gashes today A struggling creek, your tongue wriggles out from the baby's         breath to ask Were we ever anything more than    echolocation Patron saint of the meteor that falls from the sky:                          forgiven, eventually, easily

You would extend the mind beyond the act, Furious, bending, suffering in thin And unpoetic dicta; you have been Forced by hypothesis to fiercer fact. As metal singing hard, with firmness racked, You formulate our passion; and behind In some harsh moment nowise of the mind Lie the old meanings your advance has packed. No man can hold existence in the head. I, too, have known the anguish of the right Amid this net of mathematic dearth, And the brain throbbing like a ship at night: Have faced with old unmitigated dread The hard familiar wrinkles of the earth.

At four in the morning he wakes to the yawn of brakes, the snore of a diesel engine. Gone. All she left is a froth of bra and panties. The scum of the Seine and the Farset. Gallogly squats in his own pelt. A sodium street light his brought a new dimension to their black taxi. By the time they force an entry he’ll have skedaddled among hen runs and pigeon lofts. The charter flight from Florida touched down at Aldergrove minutes earlier, at 3.54 a.m. Its excess baggage takes the form of Mangas Jones, Esquire, who is, as it turns out, Apache. He carries only hand luggage. ‘Anything to declare?’ He opens the powder-blue attaché- case. ‘A pebble of quartz.’ ‘You’re an Apache?’ ‘Mescalero.’ He follows the corridor’s arroyo till the signs read Hertz. He is going to put his foot down on a patch of waste ground along the Stranmillis embankment when he gets wind of their impromptu fire. The air above the once-sweet stream is aquarium- drained. And six, maybe seven, skinheads have formed a quorum round a burnt-out heavy-duty tyre. So intent on sniffing glue they may not notice Gallogly, or, if they do, are so far gone. Three miles west as the crow flies an all-night carry-out provides the cover for an illegal drinking club. While the bar man unpacks a crate of Coca-Cola, one cool customer takes on all comers in a video game. He grasps what his two acolytes have failed to seize. Don’t they know what kind of take-away this is, the glipes? Vietmanese. Viet-ma-friggin’-knees. He drops his payload of napalm. Gallogly is wearing a candy-stripe king-size sheet, a little something he picked up off a clothes line. He is driving a milk van he borrowed from the Belfast Co-op while the milkman’s back was turned. He had given the milkman a playful rabbit punch. When he stepped on the gas he flooded the street with broken glass. He is trying to keep a low profile. The unmarked police car draws level with his last address. A sergeant and eight constables pile out of a tender and hammer up the stairs. The street bristles with static. Their sniffer dog, a Labrador bitch, bursts into the attic like David Balfour in Kidnapped. A constable on his first dawn swoop leans on a shovel. He has turned over a new leaf in her ladyship’s herb patch. They’ll take it back for analysis. All a bit much after the night shift to meet a milkman who’s double-parked his van closing your front door after him. He’s sporting your Donegal tweed suit and your Sunday shoes and politely raises your hat as he goes by. You stand there with your mouth open as he climbs into the still-warm driving seat of your Cortina and screeches off towards the motorway, leaving you uncertain of your still-warm wife’s damp tuft. Someone on their way to early Mass will find her hog-tied to the chapel gates— O Child of Prague- big-eyed, anorexic. The lesson for today is pinned to her bomber jacket. It seems to read Keep off the Grass. Her lovely head has been chopped and changed. For Beatrice, whose fathers knew Louis Quinze, to have come to this, her perruque of tar and feathers. He is pushing the maroon Cortina through the sedge on the banks of the Callan. It took him a mere forty minutes to skite up the Ml. He followed the exit sign for Loughgall and hared among the top-heavy apple orchards. This stretch of the Armagh/Tyrone border was planted by Warwickshiremen who planted in turn their familiar quick-set damson hedges. The Cortina goes to the bottom. Gallogly swallows a plummy-plum-plum. ‘I’ll warrant them’s the very pair o’ boys I seen abroad in McParland’s bottom, though where in under God— for thou art so possessed with murd’rous hate— where they come from God only knows.’ ‘They were mad for a bite o’ mate, I s’pose.’ ‘I doubt so. I come across a brave dale o’ half-chawed damsels. Wanst wun disappeared I follied the wun as yelly as Indy male.’ ‘Ye weren’t afeared?’ ‘I follied him.’ ‘God save us.’ ‘An’ he driv away in a van belongin’ t’Avis.’ The grass sprightly as Astroturf in the September frost and a mist here where the ground is low He seizes his own wrist as if, as if Blind Pew again seized Jim at the sign of the ‘Admiral Benbow’. As if Jim Hawkins led Blind Pew to Billy Bones and they were all one and the same, he stares in disbelief at an aspirin-white spot he pressed into his own palm. Gallogly’s thorn-proof tweed jacket is now several sizes too big. He has flopped down in a hay shed to ram a wad of hay into the toe of each of his ill-fitting brogues, when he gets the drift of ham and eggs. Now he’s led by his own wet nose to the hacienda-style farmhouse, a baggy-kneed animated bear drawn out of the woods by an apple pie left to cool on a windowsill. She was standing at the picture window with a glass of water and a Valium when she caught your man in the reflection of her face. He came shaping past the milking parlour as if he owned the place. Such is the integrity of their quarrel that she immediately took down the legally held shotgun and let him have both barrels. She had wanted only to clear the air. Half a mile away across the valley her husband’s U.D.R. patrol is mounting a check-point. He pricks up his ears at the crack of her prematurely arthritic hip- joint, and commandeers one of the jeeps. There now, only a powder burn as if her mascara had run. The bloody puddle in the yard, and the shilly-shally of blood like a command wire petering out behind a milk churn. A hole in the heart, an ovarian cyst. Coming up the Bann in a bubble. Disappearing up his own bum. Or, running on the spot with all the minor aplomb of a trick-cyclist. So thin, side-on, you could spit through him. His six foot of pump water bent double in agony or laughter. Keeping down-wind of everything. White Annetts. Gillyflowers. Angel Bites. When he names the forgotten names of apples he has them all off pat. His eye like the eye of a travelling rat lights on the studied negligence of these scraws of turf. A tarpaulin. A waterlogged pit. He will take stock of the Kalashnikov’s filed-down serial number, seven sticks of unstable commercial gelignite that have already begun to weep. Red Strokes. Sugar Sweet. Widows Whelps. Buy him a drink and he’ll regale you with how he came in for a cure one morning after the night before to the Las Vegas Lounge and Cabaret. He was crossing the bar’s eternity of parquet floor when his eagle eye saw something move on the horizon. If it wasn’t an Indian. A Sioux. An ugly Sioux. He means, of course, an Oglala Sioux busily tracing the family tree of an Ulsterman who had some hand in the massacre at Wounded Knee. He will answer the hedge-sparrow’s Littlebitofbreadandnocheese with a whole bunch of freshly picked watercress, a bulb of garlic, sorrel, with many-faceted blackberries. Gallogly is out to lunch. When his cock rattles its sabre he takes it in his dab hand, plants one chaste kiss on its forelock, and then, with a birl and a skirl, tosses it off like a caber. The U.D.R. corporal had come off duty to be with his wife while the others set about a follow-up search. When he tramped out just before twelve to exercise the greyhound he was hit by a single high-velocity shot. You could, if you like, put your fist in the exit wound in his chest. He slumps in the spume of his own arterial blood like an overturned paraffin lamp. Gallogly lies down in the sheugh to munch through a Beauty of Bath. He repeats himself,Bath, under his garlic-breath. Sheugh, he says.Sheugh. He is finding that first ‘sh’ increasingly difficult to manage. Sh-leeps. A milkmaid sinks her bare foot to the ankle in a simmering dung hill and fills the slot with beastlings for him to drink. In Ovid’s conspicuously tongue-in-cheek account of an eyeball to eyeball between the goddess Leto and a shower of Lycian reed cutters who refuse her a cup of cloudy water from their churned-up lake, Live then forever in that lake of yours, she cries, and has them bubble and squeak and plonk themselves down as bullfrogs In their icy jissom. A country man kneels on his cap beside his neighbour’s fresh grave-mud as Gallogly kneels to lap the primrose-yellow custard. The knees of his hand-me-down duds are gingerish. A pernickety seven- year-old girl-child parades in her mother’s trousseau and mumbles a primrose Kleenex tissue to make sure her lipstick’s even. Gallogly has only to part the veil of its stomach wall to get right under the skin, the spluttering heart and collapsed lung, of the horse in Guernica. He flees the Museum of Modern Art with its bit between his teeth. When he began to cough blood, Hamsun rode the Minneapolis/ New York night train on top of the dining-car. One long, inward howl. A porter-drinker without a thrapple. A weekend trip to the mountains north of Boston with Alice, Alice A. and her paprika hair, the ignition key to her family’s Winnebago camper, her quim biting the leg off her. In the oyster bar of Grand Central Station she gobbles a dozen Chesapeakes— ‘Oh, I’m not particular as to size’— and, with a flourish of Tabasco, turns to gobble him. A brewery lorry on a routine delivery is taking a slow, dangerous bend. The driver’s blethering his code name over the Citizens Band when someone ambles in front of him. Go, Johnny, go, go, go. He’s been dry-gulched by a sixteen-year-old numb with Mogadon, whose face is masked by the seamless black stocking filched from his mum. When who should walk in but Beatrice, large as life, or larger, sipping her one glass of lager and singing her one song. If he had it to do all over again he would let her shave his head in memory of ’98 and her own, the French, Revolution. The son of the King of the Moy met this child on the Roxborough estate.Noblesse, she said.Noblesse oblige. And her tiny nipples were bruise-bluish, wild raspberries. The song she sang was ‘The Croppy Boy’. Her grand’mère was once asked to tea by Gertrude Stein, and her grand’mère and Gertrude and Alice B.,chère Alice B. with her hook-nose, the three of them sat in the nude round the petits fours and repeated Eros is Eros is Eros. If he had it to do all over again he would still be taken in by her Alice B. Toklas Nameless Cookies and those new words she had him learn: hash, hashish,lo perfido assassin. Once the local councillor straps himself into the safety belt of his Citroën and skids up the ramp from the municipal car park he upsets the delicate balance of a mercury-tilt boobytrap. Once they collect his smithereens he doesn’t quite add up. They’re shy of a foot, and a calf which stems from his left shoe like a severely pruned-back shrub. Ten years before. The smooth-as-a front-lawn at Queen’s where she squats before a psilocybin god. The indomitable gentle-bush that had Lanyon or Lynn revise their elegant ground plan for the university quad. With calmness, with care, with breast milk, with dew. There’s no cure now. There’s nothing left to do.

I back the car over a soft, large object; hair appears on my chest in dreams. The paperboy comes to collect with a pit bull. Call Grandmother and she says, Well you know death is death and none other. In the mornings we’re in the dark; even at the end of June the zucchini keep on the sill. Ring Grandmother for advice and she says, O you know I used to grow so many things. Then there’s the frequent bleeding, the tender nipples, and the rot under the floormat. If I’m not seeing a cold-eyed doctor it is another gouging mechanic. Grandmother says, Thanks to the blue rugs and Eileen Briscoe’s elms the house keeps cool. Well. Then. You say Grandmother let me just ask you this: How does a body rise up again and rinse her mouth from the tap. And how does a body put in a plum tree or lie again on top of another body or string a trellis. Or go on drying the flatware. Fix rainbow trout. Grout the tile. Buy a bag of onions. Beat an egg stiff. Yes, how does the cat continue to lick itself from toenail to tailhole. And how does a body break bread with the word when the word has broken. Again. And. Again. With the wine. And the loaf. And the excellent glass of the body. And she says, Even. If. The. Sky. Is. Falling. My. Peace. Rose. Is. In. Bloom.

Newsmen call it the Cuban Missile Crisis. Teachers say it's the end of the world. At school, they instruct us to look up and watch the Cuban-cursed sky. Search for a streak of light. Listen for a piercing shriek, the whistle that will warn us as poisonous A-bombs zoom close. Hide under a desk. Pretend that furniture is enough to protect us against perilous flames. Radiation. Contamination. Toxic breath. Each air-raid drill is sheer terror, but some of the city kids giggle. They don't believe that death is real. They've never touched a bullet, or seen a vulture, or made music by shaking the jawbone of a mule. When I hide under my frail school desk, my heart grows as rough and brittle as the slab of wood that fails to protect me from reality's gloom.