Paul Muldoon

That Boxing Day morning, I would hear the familiar, far-off gowls and

                    gulders

over Keenaghan and Aughanlig

of a pack of beagles, old dogs disinclined to chase a car suddenly quite

                    unlike

themselves, pups coming helter-skelter

across the plowlands with all the chutzpah of veterans

of the trenches, their slate-grays, cinnamons, liver-browns, lemons, rusts,

                    and violets

turning and twisting, unseen, across the fields,

their gowls and gulders turning and twisting after the twists and turns

of the great hare who had just now sauntered into the yard where I stodd

                    on tiptoe

astride my new Raleigh cycle,

his demeanor somewhat louche, somewhat lackadaisical

under the circumstances, what with him standing on tiptoe

as if to mimic me, standing almost as tall as I, looking as if he might for a

                    moment put

himself in my place, thinking better of it, sloping off behind the lorry bed.

The selfsame, the siren 

of icy waters, shrugging off as she does the Baltic 

to hang out in our seas, 

our inlets, the rivers

through which she climbs, bed-hugger, who keeps going against

the flow, from branch to branch, then 

from capillary to snagged capillary, 

farther and farther in, deeper and deeper into the heart 

of the rock, straining 

through mud runnels, till one day 

a flash of light from the chestnut trees

sends a fizzle through a standing well, 

through a drain that goes

by dips and darts from the Apennines to the Romagna — 

the selfsame eel, a firebrand now, a scourge, 

the arrow shaft of Love on earth 

which only the gulches or dried-out 

gullies of the Pyrenees might fetch and ferry back 

to some green and pleasant spawning ground, 

a green soul scouting and scanning 

for life where only 

drought and desolation have hitherto clamped down, 

the spark announcing 

that all sets forth when all that’s set forth 

is a charred thing, a buried stump, 

this short-lived rainbow, its twin met

in what’s set there between your eyelashes, 

you who keep glowing as you do, undiminished, among the sons 

of man, faces glistening with your slime, can’t you take in

her being your next-of-kin?

The lion stretched like a sandstone lion on a sandstone slab

of a bridge with one fixture, a gaslight,

looks up from his nicotine-worried forepaw

with the very same air my father, Patrick,

had when the results came back from the lab, that air of anguish-awe

that comes with the realization of just how slight

the chances are of anything doing the trick

as the sun goes down over Ballyknick and Ballymacnab

and a black-winged angel takes flight.

The black-winged angel leaning over the sandstone parapet

of the bridge wears a business suit, dark gray. His hair is slick with pomade.

He turns away as my mother, Brigid,

turned away from not only her sandstone pet

but any concession being made.

The black-winged angel sets her face to the unbending last ray

of evening and meets rigid with rigid

as the sun goes down over Lisnagat and Listamlet

and Clonmore and Clintyclay.

Feckless as he was feckless, as likely as her to be in a foofaraw,

I have it in me to absolutely rant and rail while, for fear of the backlash,

absolutely renounce

the idea of holding anything that might be construed as an opinion.

The lion still looks back to his raw

knuckle and sighs for the possibility that an ounce

of Walnut Plug might shape up from the ash

The angel still threatens to abandon us with a single flick of her pinion

as the sun goes down over Lislasly and Lissaraw

and Derrytrasna and Derrymacash.

Absalom was riding his mule and the mule passed under the thick branches of a great oak. Absalom’s head got caught in the oak and he was left hanging between heaven and

earth, while the mule he was riding went on.

– II SAMUEL 18:9

I make my way alone through the hand-to-hand fighting

to A3 and A5. Red velvet. Brass and oak.

The special effects will include strobe lighting

and artificial smoke.

A glance to A5. Patrons are reminded, mar bheadh,

that the management accepts no responsibility in the case of theft.

Even as the twenty-five-piece orchestra

that’s masked offstage left

strikes up, there’s still a chance, I suppose, that the gainsayers

might themselves be gainsaid

as you rush, breathless, into my field of vision.

Understudies and standbys never substitute for listed players,

however, unless a specific announcement is made.

There will be no intermission.

I

The plowboy was something his something as I nibbled the lobe

of her right ear and something her blouse

for the Empire-blotchy globe

of her left breast on which there something a something louse.

II

Those something lice like something seed pearls

and her collar something with dandruff

as when Queen Elizabeth entertained the Earls

in her something something ruff.

III

I might have something the something groan

of the something plowboy who would with such something urge

the something horses, a something and a roan,

had it not been for the something splurge

of something like the hare

which even now managed to something itself from the something

                                                  plowshare.