Paul Muldoon

Why Brownlee left, and where he went, Is a mystery even now. For if a man should have been content It was him; two acres of barley, One of potatoes, four bullocks, A milker, a slated farmhouse. He was last seen going out to plough On a March morning, bright and early. By noon Brownlee was famous; They had found all abandoned, with The last rig unbroken, his pair of black Horses, like man and wife, Shifting their weight from foot to Foot, and gazing into the future.

They've been so long above it all, those two petals so steeped in style they seem to stall in the kettle simmering over the town dump or, better still, the neon-flashed, X-rated rump of fresh roadkill courtesy of the interstate that Eisenhower would overtake in the home straight by one horsepower, the kettle where it all boils down to the thick scent of death, a scent of such renown it's given vent to the idea buzzards can spot a deer carcass a mile away, smelling the rot as, once, Marcus Aurelius wrinkled his nose at a gas leak from the Great Sewer that ran through Rome to the Tiber then went searching out, through the gloam, one subscriber to the other view that the rose, full-blown, antique, its no-frills ruff, the six-foot shrug of its swing-wings, the theologian's and the thug's twin triumphings in a buzzard's shaved head and snood, buzz-buzz-buzzy, its logic in all likelihood somewhat fuzzy, would ever come into focus, it ever deign to dispense its hocus-pocus in that same vein as runs along an inner thigh to where, too right, the buzzard vouchsafes not to shy away from shite, its mission not to give a miss to a bête noire, all roly-poly, full of piss and vinegar, trying rather to get to grips with the grommet of the gut, setting its tinsnips to that grommet in the spray-painted hind's hindgut and making a sweeping, too right, a sweeping cut that's so blasé it's hard to imagine, dear Sis, why others shrink from this sight of a soul in bliss, so in the pink from another month in the red of the shambles, like a rose in over its head among brambles, unflappable in its belief it's Ararat on which the Ark would come to grief, abjuring that Marcus Aurelius humbug about what springs from earth succumbing to the tug at its heartstrings, reported to live past fifty, as you yet may, dear Sis, perhaps growing your hair in requital, though briefly, of whatever tears at your vitals, learning, perhaps, from the nifty, nay thrifty, way these buzzards are given to stoop and take their ease by letting their time-chastened poop fall to their knees till they're almost as bright with lime as their night roost, their poop containing an enzyme that's known to boost their immune systems, should they prong themselves on small bones in a cerebral cortex, at no small cost to their well-being, sinking fast in a deer crypt, buzzards getting the hang at last of being stripped of their command of the vortex while having lost their common touch, they've been so long above it all.

I That case-hardened cop. A bull moose in a boghole brought him to a stop. II From his grassy knoll he has you in his crosshairs, the accomplice mole. III The sword once a share. This forest a fresh-faced farm. This stone once a stair. IV The birch crooks her arm, as if somewhat more inclined to welcome the swarm. V He has, you will find, two modes only, the chipmunk: fast-forward; rewind. VI The smell, like a skunk, of coffee about to perk. Thelonius Monk. VII They're the poker work of some sort of woodpecker, these holes in the bark. VIII My new fact checker claims that pilus means "pestle." My old fact checker. IX Those Rose and Thistle. Where the hummingbird drops in to wet his whistle. X Behind the wood bin a garter snake snaps itself, showing us some skin. XI Like most bits of delf, the turtle's seen its best on one's neighbor's shelf. XII Riding two abreast on their stripped-down, souped-up bikes, bears in leather vests. XIII The eye-shaded shrike. BIRD BODIES BURIED IN BOG'S a headline he'll spike. XIV Steady, like a log riding a sawmill's spillway, the steady coydog. XV The cornet he plays was Bolden's, then Beiderbecke's, this lonesome blue jay. XVI Some fresh auto wreck. Slumped over a horn. Sump pool. The frog's neck-braced neck. XVII Brillo pads? Steel wool? The regurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgitations, what, of a long-eared owl? XVIII The jet with the jot. The drive-in screen with the sky. The blood with the blot. XIX How all seems to vie, not just my sleeping laptop with the first firefly.

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 'Is it really a revolution, though?' I reached across the wicker table With another $10,000 question. My celebrated pamphleteer, Co-author of such volumes As Blood on the Rose, The Dream and the Drums, And How It Happened Here, Would pour some untroubled Muscatel And settle back in his cane chair. 'Look, son. Just look around you. People are getting themselves killed Left, right and centre While you do what? Write rondeaux? There's more to living in this country Than stars and horses, pigs and trees, Not that you'd guess it from your poems. Do you never listen to the news? You want to get down to something true, Something a little nearer home.' I called again later that afternoon, A quiet suburban street. 'You want to stand back a little When the world's at your feet.' I'd have liked to have heard some more Of his famous revolution. I rang the bell, and knocked hard On what I remembered as his front door, That opened then, as such doors do, Directly on to a back yard. II Not any back yard, I'm bound to say, And not a thousand miles away From here. No one's taken in, I'm sure, By such a mild invention. But where (I wonder myself) do I stand, In relation to a table and chair, The quince tree I forgot to mention, That suburban street, the door, the yard— All made up as I went along As things that people live among. And such a person as lived there! My celebrated pamphleteer! Of course, I gave it all away With those preposterous titles. The Bloody Rose?The Dream and the Drums? The three-day wonder of the flowering plum! Or was I desperately wishing To have been their other co-author, Or, at least, to own a first edition Of The Boot Boys and Other Battles? 'When are you going to tell the truth?' For there's no such book, so far as I know, As How it Happened Here, Though there may be. There may. What should I say to this callow youth Who learned to write last winter— One of those correspondence courses— And who's coming to lunch today? He'll be rambling on, no doubt, About pigs and trees, stars and horses.

When I put my finger to the hole they've cut for a dimmer switch in a wall of plaster stiffened with horsehair it seems I've scratched a two-hundred-year-old itch with a pink and a pink and a pinkie-pick. When I put my ear to the hole I'm suddenly aware of spades and shovels turning up the gain all the way from Raritan to the Delaware with a clink and a clink and a clinky-click. When I put my nose to the hole I smell the floodplain of the canal after a hurricane and the spots of green grass where thousands of Irish have lain with a stink and a stink and a stinky-stick. When I put my eye to the hole I see one holding horse dung to the rain in the hope, indeed, indeed, of washing out a few whole ears of grain with a wink and a wink and a winkie-wick. And when I do at last succeed in putting my mouth to the horsehair-fringed niche I can taste the small loaf of bread he baked from that whole seed with a link and a link and a linky-lick.

The snail moves like a Hovercraft, held up by a Rubber cushion of itself, Sharing its secret With the hedgehog. The hedgehog Shares its secret with no one. We say, Hedgehog, come out Of yourself and we will love you. We mean no harm. We want Only to listen to what You have to say. We want Your answers to our questions. The hedgehog gives nothing Away, keeping itself to itself. We wonder what a hedgehog Has to hide, why it so distrusts. We forget the god Under this crown of thorns. We forget that never again Will a god trust in the world.

She. My people came from Korelitz where they grew yellow cucumbers and studied the Talmud. He. Mine pored over the mud of mangold- and potato-pits or flicked through kale plants from Comber as bibliomancers of old went a-flicking through deckle-mold. She. Mine would lie low in the shtetl when they heard the distant thunder stolen by the Cossacks. He. It was potato sacks lumped together on a settle mine found themselves lying under, the Peep O'Day Boys from Loughgall making Defenders of us all. She. Mine once controlled the sugar trade from the islets of Langerhans and were granted the deed to Charlottesville.He. Indeed? My people called a spade a spade and were admitted to the hanse of pike- and pickax-men, shovels leaning to their lean-to hovels. She. Mine were trained to make a suture after the bomb and the bombast have done their very worst. He. Between fearsad and verst we may yet construct our future as we've reconstructed our past and cry out, my love, each to each from his or her own quicken-queach. She. Each from his stand of mountain ash will cry out over valley farms spotlit with pear blossom. He. There some young Absalom picks his way through cache after cache of ammunition and small arms hidden in grain wells, while his nag tugs at a rein caught on a snag.

Small wonder he’s not been sighted all winter; this old brock’s been to Normandy and back through the tunnels and trenches of his subconscious. His father fell victim to mustard-gas at the Somme; one of his sons lost a paw to a gin-trap at Lisbellaw: another drills on the Antrim hills’ still-molten lava in a moth-eaten Balaclava. An elaborate system of foxholes and duckboards leads to the terminal moraine of an ex-linen baron’s croquet-lawn where he’s part-time groundsman. I would find it somewhat infra dig to dismiss him simply as a pig or heed Gerald of Wales’ tall tales of badgers keeping badger-slaves. For when he shuffles across the esker I glimpse my grandfather’s whiskers stained with tobacco-pollen. When he piddles against a bullaun I know he carries bovine TB but what I see is my father in his Sunday suit’s bespoke lime and lignite, patrolling his now-diminished estate and taking stock of this and that.

As naught gives way to aught and oxhide gives way to chain mail and byrnie gives way to battle-ax and Cavalier gives way to Roundhead and Cromwell Road gives way to the Connaught and I Am Curious (Yellow) gives way to I Am Curious (Blue) and barrelhouse gives way to Frank’N’Stein and a pint of Shelley plain to a pint of India Pale Ale I give way to you. As bass gives way to baritone and hammock gives way to hummock and Hoboken gives way to Hackensack and bread gives way to reed bed and bald eagle gives way to Theobald Wolfe Tone and the Undertones give way to Siouxsie Sioux and DeLorean, John, gives way to Deloria, Vine, and Pierced Nose to Big Stomach I give way to you. As vent gives way to Ventry and the King of the World gives way to Finn MacCool and phone gives way to fax and send gives way to sned and Dagenham gives way to Coventry and Covenanter gives way to caribou and the caribou gives way to the carbine and Boulud’s cackamamie to the cock-a-leekie of Boole I give way to you. As transhumance gives way to trance and shaman gives way to Santa and butcher’s string gives way to vacuum pack and the ineffable gives way to the unsaid and pyx gives way to monstrance and treasure aisle gives way to need-blind pew and Calvin gives way to Calvin Klein and Town and Country Mice to Hanta I give way to you. As Hopi gives way to Navaho and rug gives way to rag and Pax Vobiscum gives way to Tampax and Tampa gives way to the water bed and The Water Babies gives way to Worstward Ho and crapper gives way to loo and spruce gives way to pine and the carpet of pine needles to the carpetbag I give way to you. As gombeen-man gives way to not-for-profit and soft soap gives way to Lynn C. Doyle and tick gives way to tack and Balaam’s Ass gives way to Mister Ed and Songs of Innocence gives way to The Prophet and single-prop Bar-B-Q gives way to twin-screw and the Salt Lick gives way to the County Line and “Mending Wall” gives way to “Build Soil” I give way to you. As your hummus gives way to your foul madams and your coy mistress gives way to “The Flea” and flax gives way to W. D. Flackes and the living give way to the dead and John Hume gives way to Gerry Adams and Television gives way to U2 and Lake Constance gives way to the Rhine and the Rhine to the Zuider Zee I give way to you. As dutch treat gives way to french leave and spanish fly gives way to Viagra and slick gives way to slack and the local fuzz give way to the Feds and Machiavelli gives way to make-believe and Howards End gives way to A Room with a View and Wordsworth gives way to “Woodbine Willie” and stereo Nagra to quad Niagara I give way to you. As cathedral gives way to cavern and cookie cutter gives way to cookie and the rookies give way to the All-Blacks and the shad give way to the smoke shed and the roughshod give way to the Black Horse avern that still rings true despite that T being missing from its sign where a little nook gives way to a little nookie when I give way to you. That Nanook of the North should give way to Man of Aran as ling gives way to cod and cod gives way to kayak and Camp Moosilauke gives way to Club Med and catamite gives way to catamaran and catamaran to aluminum canoe is symptomatic of a more general decline whereby a cloud succumbs to a clod and I give way to you. For as Monet gives way to Juan Gris and Juan Gris gives way to Joan Miró and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer gives way to Miramax and the Volta gives way to Travolta, swinging the red-hot lead, and Saturday Night Fever gives way to Grease and the Greeks give way to you know who and the Roman IX gives way to the Arabic 9 and nine gives way, as ever, to zero I give way to you.