One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2 page)

All with the same insignia on their scale-armored sleeves.

Refulgent all. From
fulgere
, “to flash.”

PELT

Now rain rattled

the roof of my car

like holy water

on a coffin lid,

holy water and mud

landing with a thud

though as I listened

the uproar

faded to the stoniest

of silences … They piled

it on all day

till I gave way

to a contentment

I'd not felt in years,

not since that winter

I'd worn the world

against my skin,

worn it fur side in.

CHARLES ÉMILE JACQUE:
POULTRY AMONG TREES

It was in Eglish that my father kept the shop

jam-packed with Inglis loaves, butter,

Fray Bentos corned beef, Omo, Daz, Beechams Powders,

Andrews liver salts, Halls cough drops,

where I wheezed longingly from my goose-downed truckle

at a Paris bun's sugared top.

A tiny bell rang sweetly. The word on the tip

of my tongue was “honeysuckle.”

When one of his deep-litter chickens filled its crop

with hay from the adjoining shed

my father opened it with a razor blade, reached

in, pulled out the shimmering sop,

then sewed it up with a darning needle and thread.

That childhood memory came back

now a fracas had left two hens with gaping beaks,

one with what seemed a severed head.

Though I might have taken the blueprint of a shack

from
Poultry Keeping for Dummies
,

I'd fancied myself more an Ovid in Tomis—

determined to wing it, to tack

together Jahangiri Mahal from a jumble

of 2×4 studs, malachite,

run-of-the-mill planks, cedar shingles, more offcuts

in New Jersey's rough-and-tumble.

Now it looked as if there had been a pillow fight

in and around the chicken run.

Our pointer, Sherlock, had instigated a reign

of terror, scaring the daylights

out of the hens (in a spirit of good clean fun,

no doubt), launching a morning raid

such as Meleager & Co. had launched to root

out the great boar of Calydon.

Their temperature being 106 centigrade

might account for the quizzical

view chickens take of history going in cycles,

but I could divine from the jade

of her exposed neck, the movement of her gizzard

jewelled by broken oyster shells,

one hen had ventured so far on the gravel shoals

she'd become less hen than lizard.

As the echoes of Sherlock's high-pitched rebel yells

clung to the thatch in a smoke knot,

I'd only very gradually taken note

how Herbert Hoover's casting spells

(and offering that “chicken in every pot”)

had come too late for Robert Frost,

cooped up as he'd been on the edge of a forest

with some 300 Wyandottes.

Odd that the less obviously wounded hen be lost

to the great realm of the cageless

while a slash-throat somehow lingers. Though I cudgeled

my brains, the only thought that crossed

my mind was how the sisters of Meleager

had once morphed into guinea hens.

I found myself looking to Aries, the heinous

Dog Star, then to Ursa Major.

Those next few days, the slash-throat held out a quill pen

with which we might together draw

up a plan for how I could help her muddle through.

Her comb and wattles were cayenne

under a heat lamp. Her throat left my own throat raw.

She lifted her head on its latch.

It was as if a sop of hay had become lodged

in my own mother-of-pearled craw.

The ears of barley, whole wheat, and corn mixed from scratch

I boiled down further. My new razor

had me on edge. I was such an early riser

I'd become less man than rooster. An extra batch

of the barley/wheat/corn mush might help her brazen

it out. Till she could shake a leg

(and a wing!), I'd feed her the stuff I myself like—

marigolds, cottage cheese, raisins.

Though Fabergé's first inlaying a gilt hen egg

was by imperial decree

it's easy to see why we dunghill roosters crow

when we set off a powder keg

at our own behest, winding ourselves with a key

till our workaday art's a match

for workaday life, a feature rarely as much

to the fore as in
Poultry Among Trees
.

Here the angle of the ridgepole (though blurred by thatch)

leads the eye to an odd focal

point where two hen harriers confirm how fickle

is our grasp on things. If a patched

chicken did once attest to his skill in sewing,

my father still boned up in full

on “how to remove the merry-thought of a fowl”

from
One Thousand Things Worth Knowing
.

Even if I have helped my own hen to pull

through by dint of mash and mush-talk

I'm still far less disposed to look to the sky dog

for assent, or to the sky bull,

to look to any of those old cocks-of-the-walk.

Not for me strutting out at dusk

and pretending to be equal to any task

while sporting a cayenne Mohawk.

Once I glimpsed the ideal under a dry husk.

All I see now is the foible

in a sword. I often think of Aesop's fable

where a great boar sharpens his tusk

against all likelihood. Now being a goitered

rooster is all that's on the cards

for me, I suspect, consigned to the pile of grit

I myself once reconnoitered.

I was a Rhode Island Red rooster standing guard

in Eglish as my father sliced.

“Think like a man of action,” wrote Mr. Sallust,

“act like a man of thought.” The yard

opened on my less-than-steady Peter, then Christ,

then the rum-numbed hen, then the nail

from which it hung. As an emblem of renewal,

surely that hen would have sufficed?

My own new regimen of cottage cheese and kale

continues to help me toughen

my resolve in ways Sherlock himself might divine.

The elongation of his tail

has been traced to a long line of partridge flushers

and catchers of hares on the hop.

I don't mind being relegated to the heap

where I once stood as both door and usher.

For I've no aspirations now ever to strop

my beak on the bark of a church.

Ever to be a weather vane … To be in charge …

That's for a motorcycle cop,

all Ray-Bans and chrome, so ill at ease on the perch

of a fire escape in a flop-

house in west L.A., the downy feathers he'll flip

through in a routine background search.

Now my right-as-rain hen, like my father's post-op

hen, will shine out from her dunghill.

That sweet little bell … I recognize its tinkle …

Another customer who'll drop

by for Bisto, Bovril, Colman's English Mustard,

liquorice allsorts, lollipops,

War Horse plug tobacco, Gillette razors, Bo-Peeps,

Chivers Jelly, or Bird's Custard.

PIP AND MAGWITCH

In an effort to distract his victim and throw the police off his scent,

Anwar al-Awlaki had left a paperback of
Great Expectations

all bundled up with a printer-cartridge bomb. They found his fingerprints

on the page—wouldn't you know?—where Dickens,

having put us all in a quandary on the great marshes of Kent,

now sets us down with Pip and the leg-ironed convict, Abel Magwitch,

Pip forever chained to Magwitch by dint

of having brought him a pork pie and file in a little care package.

For the moment, he's a seven-year-old whose Christmas Eve's spent

trying to come up with a way to outfox

this hard-line neighbor, unshaven, the smell of a Polo Mint

not quite masking his breath, his cigar twirling in its unopened sarcophagus

like an Egyptian mummy, one dismissive of the chance

it will ever come into its inheritance.

A DENT

    
In memory of Michael Allen

The height of one stall at odds with the next in your grandfather's byre

where cattle allowed themselves to speak only at Yule

gave but little sense of why you taught us to admire

the capacity of a three-legged stool

to take pretty much everything in its stride,

even the card-carrying Crow who let out a war whoop

now your red pencil was poised above my calf-hide

manuscript like a graip above a groop.

The depth of a dent in the flank of your grandfather's cow

from his having leaned his brow

against it morning and night

for twenty years of milking by hand

gave but little sense of how distant is the land

on which you had us set our sights.

DODGEMS

The pink cloud hanging over Barry's amusement park in Portrush.

So plainspoken, candy floss. The Freemasons' Hall

boarded up for the whole month of August. The almost constant rainfall.

We're right between the start of the grouse- and partridge-

shooting seasons. Red sails in the sunset way off Portstewart.

I've resorted to singing “Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”

to the landlady's Pekingese.

The bookcase in the B&B holds Hermann Hesse's
Siddhartha
,

the American first edition. It's 1960. The decade being ushered

in may yet be a decade of selflessness. My hankering for that hula hoop

stands in the way of enlightenment. The biplane looping the loop.

Even Ramore Head will have its right shoulder bared

à la Buddha. The wooden roller coaster will eventually get on track.

For now it's all about novelty,

starting with novelty songs. The landlady shyly denies supporting Linfield.

Shane Leslie has handed over the deed of Lough Derg

to the Diocese of Clogher. The landlady's demurral

is in strict contrast with these no-nonsense

bumper cars. It cuts no ice with them, the thought of sitting on the fence.

I'd hoped a gelato from Morelli's

might help me through the chapter on avarice.

For now I'm joined on the rink by the dodgem boy, an out-and-out maniac.

Our electrical pick-up poles are the tails of chipmunks.

Though our celestial canopy is on the fritz,

I'm blessed with a godlike cotton-candy beard.

Our pick-up poles may be quite forthright, our confrontations quite unabashed,

but the lambskin apron in which the dodgem boy collects the cash

is symbolic of a pure heart.

BARRAGE BALLOONS, BUCK ALEC, BIRD FLU, AND YOU

    
for Dermot Seymour

After those first paintings at Art Research and Exchange

I would never again be able to go home, never mind home on the range.

The Swede who invented the Aga

had previously lost his sight to an explosion. The rain summoned by a blackbird's raga

came sweeping over the Shankill, over the burning car

where Boston and Lowther were dumped, having been fingered in the bar

as a Prod and a Pape

enjoying a wee jar together. A wee escapade. A wee escape.

That would have been January 1977, when you were twenty, I twenty-five.

An era when we might still devoutly skive

off for the afternoon to the Washington or the Crown Liquor Saloon.

Almost every day someone floated a barrage balloon

over the city. We treated the wicker fence

that ran between us with such reverence

it might have been hooked up not to the balloon covered in ox-hide strips

but the “ox-hide” ingots of tin from a sunken Phoenician ship.

Until I met you in Tedford's Ship Chandlers, where we'd both gone to buy new sails,

I'd assumed the boat I was in was the largest not to use nails.

All along you'd been spirit-gumming a Harrier jump jet

while the wind blew its own trumpet

at the exploits of Buck Alec Robinson and Silver McKee.

In Sailortown alone there were three

of those sweetie shops

where they still sold pieties at a penny a pop.

In the midst of all those sacred cows, in the midst of the fish, flesh, and fowl,

we heard only the limer-hounds howl

as they pursued a mountain hare we'd taken as our totem.

Often a swollen scrotum

may not be traced back to an ill-fitting loincloth

just as not all potato diseases may be laid at the door of the potato moth.

On Cave Hill, meanwhile, the hunt was on and the time was ripe

for the limer-hounds to revert to type.

Though you may dismiss as utter tosh

my theory this gung-ho stallion's by Bacon out of Bosch,

there's no denying a rooster

will put most of us in a flooster

while the pig that turns out to be less pig than ham

is every bit as alarming. Am I right in thinking that's meant to be a ram

in a ferraiolo cape?

Hasn't the ewe with scrapie got herself into a scrape?

I don't suppose the moorland streams over which the huntsmen ride roughshod

and the puddles through which their horses plod

will give rise to enough salmon

to fertilize the soil and stave off another famine.

I hadn't seen the connection between “spade” and “spud”

and “quid” and “cud”