One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (3 page)

till I noticed the mouth of an Indian elephant from the same troupe

the filmmakers fitted with “African” ears and tusks was stained with nettle soup.

It's taken me thirty years to discover the purple dye on your royal mail

derives not from a sea snail

but the fact you're a scion

of the house in which Buck Alec kept a lion,

albeit a
toothless
lion, which he was given to parade along the Old Shore Road.

I still half-expect to meet Buck Alec conducting a merkin-toad

on the end of a piece of Tedford's rope

while decrying as aberrations Henry Joy McCracken and Jemmy Hope.

We've all been there, I realize, on the brink

of a butte covered with sea pink

and rising from the swell like an organ pedal.

Think of Kit Carson, Freemason as he was, winning another tin medal

for giving the Navajo the old “Get Thee Hence”

from their pinnacle. Although the UK is now under mass surveillance

this ram couldn't give a tuppenny tup

about the passing of the cup.

Even Christ's checking us out from his observation post.

Even he can't quite bend
Tiocfaidh Ár Lá
to the tune of “Ghost

Riders in the Sky.” An Orangeman in his regalia is still regaling us with a sermon

about the ways of Fermanagh men and other vermin.

The Aga-inventor continues to gape

through the streetscape

of smoke and dust and broken glass flickering down like so much ticker tape

from the entry into Jerusalem of the King of the Apes.

RITA DUFFY:
WATCHTOWER II

    
1

From here it looks as if the whole country is spread under a camouflage tarp

rolled out by successive British garrisons

stationed in Crossmaglen. As teenagers we worked our way through
Íosagán

Agus Sgéalta Eile
while selling shocks and struts

from a tumbledown garage. Our vision of Four Green Fields shrinks to the olive drab

the Brits throw over everything. This must be their version of a
tour d'horizon
,

their scanners scanning our hillsides while we still try to scan

a verse by Pádraig Pearse. One advantage of a farm that, as they say,
bestrides

the border is how industrial diesel

dyed with a green dye ferries itself from the South into the North

by force of gravity alone. The fact that laundered diesel's then worth

twice at much at the pump supports the usual

tendencies of the punters to misjudge

our motives and see us as common criminals. Like seeing smoke in a paint smudge.

    
2

One of our neighbors, interned for selling
An Phoblacht
, learned we're not the first tribe

to have been put down or the first to have risen

against our oppressors. That's why we've always sided with the Redskin

and the Palestinian. It must be because steroids

are legal in the North but not the South the Brits like to eavesdrop

on our comings and goings. As for kerosene,

the fact that it's cheaper in the North is enough to sicken

our happiness. That and the upstarts

who try to horn in on our operation. We're in a constant tussle

with these Seoiníns-come-lately, a constant back-and-forth

on the business of smuggling fuel. We run it through cat litter or fuller's earth

to absolve it of the dye. By far the biggest hassle

is trying to get rid of the green sludge

left over from the process. It infiltrates our clothes. It's impossible to budge.

A NIGHT ON THE TILES WITH J. C. MANGAN

    
1

Some call for “macerated.” Some call for “stewed.”

The prunes are oddly fizzy

from narcosis.

    
2

Not that Francis Bacon.
That
Francis Bacon.

The barcode

on the cereal box is Ogham.

    
3

At least we haven't misconstrued

two eggs over easy

as a lace-frilled pair of knickers.

    
4

At least we haven't mistaken

a bottle of Paraquat

for a 1990 Château d'Yquem.

    
5

We'll swear this is the last time as we swore the rain

would never darken our doors again.

SAFFRON

Sometimes I'd happen on Alexander and Cleopatra

and several of their collaborators

tucking into a paella

tinged with saffron, saffron thought to be a cure

for scabies, bloody scours,

fires in the belly,

skin cancer, the ancient pestilence of Sumer,

not to speak of Alzheimer's

and plain old melancholy.

I'm pretty sure things first

started to look bleak in 1987 at the University

of East Anglia

where I was introduced to the art of the lament

by Ezekiel. His electric fire's single element

was an orange ice lolly.

He made me think I might lose my spot

as number one hod carrier in Mesopotamia,

a role that came quite easily

now I lived in a ziggurat

overlooking a man-made lake and sipped sugared

water with a swarm of honeybees.

Though A Flock of Seagulls

were scheduled to play the Union, there had been an icicle

in my heart since Anubis,

half-man, half-jackal,

had palmed me off on Ezekiel

for ritual embalmment.

He claimed A Flock of Seagulls were a one-hit wonder,

desert flowers left high and dry

on the polder. Anubis refused to implement

the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

He also told me the church clock in Crimond

had sixty-one minutes

to the hour. Ezekiel, meanwhile, was convinced

that Creative Writing, still in its infancy,

would amount

to a bona fide

academic pursuit only if students weren't spoon-fed

but came to think of literature

as magical rather than magisterial.

Saffron itself was derived from the three stigma-tufts of a sterile

crocus that, ground, were often adulterated

with turmeric. An icicle was formed

precisely because it would repeatedly warm

to the idea of camaraderie,

then repeatedly give in to chilliness.

I took comfort from the insistence of the anchoress, Julian,

on the utter

necessity of sin for self-knowledge, a theory I'd have to tout

to the Hare Krishna devotees

who'd sworn off sex outside procreation in marriage.

Sometimes I'd see one, late at night, in saffron robe and topknot,

stranded at a bus stop

on the outskirts of Norwich.

AT THE LAB

Somewhere off the Grand Banks

a lapstrake sea that sailed into the teeth

of a gale now foundered on a reef

and promptly sank.

I was at the lab to analyze the spore

in a seaweed wreath

marking the spot where it came to grief,

you the pollen in a sediment core

from a bog in Ireland where, thanks

to its being built plank-upon-plank

(each rig fastened to the one beneath),

a plowed field running alongside the shore

had reached North America before

Eric or Leif.

A CIVIL WAR SUITE

1. MATHEW BRADY:
FIRST BATTLE OF BULL RUN

Wasn't it, after all, Irish riffraff

from the docks of New Orleans,

Irish “wharf rats,”

louts and longshoremen,

Irish toughs and roughs

(any of whom would gleefully drive a lance

through the heart

of William Tecumseh Sherman),

Irish rogues and rapscallions,

culchies and munchies

who'd make up the 1st Louisiana Special Battalion

at the First Battle of Manassas

and allow Brady to become such a dab

hand at fixing that
guerre
in Daguerreotype?

 

 

2. WALT WHITMAN: “CAVALRY CROSSING A FORD”

It's hardly too much to trace the “guidon”

to the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine

and her idea of chivalry bred in the bone.

The “loitering” horses about to spill their guts

are by Keats, for sure, but Keats

out of Tennyson.

That “musical clank” is Whitman's alone.

 

 

3. LOUIS LANG:
RETURN OF THE 69TH (IRISH) REGIMENT, N.Y.S.M. FROM THE SEAT OF WAR

It's been just a week since they were seen off

by Stonewall Jackson at Bull Run,

which may be why the only one to doff

his cap as if there might be an outbreak of fun

is Captain Meagher, an intimate of muddling through

since he escaped Van Diemen's Land in 1852.

You'll notice how a smoothbore gun

of the type Meagher favors for close combat

has found its way into the hands

of two brothers who are themselves in a spat

as to why a bayonet might expand

on an entry wound. Sometimes it's only by a crowded pier

we recognize what we hold dear.

The rifle points toward the linen bands

in which Sergeant Tracy's own wounds are wrapped.

His wife helps him off the baggage cart.

Lieutenant Nugent's right arm is strapped

awkwardly in a sling. The crowd must surely part

before these six or seven drummer boys.

We can all but hear the poise

they bring to those snare drums. It's a tribute to Lang's art

that we might for a moment forget the sniper

to whom so much of this may be assigned

and focus on an uilleann piper

lodged in the shadows, for when it comes to what lies behind

the impulse to fade

into the background at this or any parade

the truth is he's no less blind

to us than we are to him.

I doubt somehow he'll ever make a start

on learning “The Battle Hymn

of the Republic.” I suppose some might take heart

from Father O'Reilly confiding in a widow how this cup

will pass while drawing up

a slightly revised version of the heaven chart

or the half-smile on a man who greets his child

for the first time, or the non-sniper up a tree,

or even the piper who's beguiled

Meagher into thinking Ireland might soon be free.

Stooped though he may be over his chanter and drones,

he raises everything a semitone

and allows us for the first time to see

beyond the harbor sky with its rents and rips

to what is now a no-fly dome

where we at last begin to get to grips

with the discontinued Kodachrome

of our great transports

that hardly ever put into ports

and our flag-draped coffins secretly airlifted home.

 

 

4. EMILY DICKINSON: “A SLASH OF BLUE—A SWEEP OF GRAY”

Here some still scout

a vineyard path

to trample out

the grapes of wrath …

How many died

in the bloodbath?

This side? That side?

You do the math.

 

 

5. SALLY MANN:
MANASSAS

Less the idea of what the world might be “like”

than what it is “like
photographed
”

has had us lug

over glacier-grooved

and -polished mountains what we once took

for luggage, bags of hominy grits,

barrels of pork and hardtack,

wall-to-wall crates

of wet-glass negatives,

the tackle by which we still hold on with grim

determination to our salt codfish,

the portable darkroom

in which we've yet to cure

ourselves of the idea that art is “pure” or “impure.”

RECALCULATING

    
1

Arthritis is to psoriasis as Portugal is to Brazil.

Brazil is to wood as war club is to war.

War is to wealth as performance is to appraisal.

Appraisal is to destiny as urn is to ear.

Ear is to grasshopper as China is to DDT.

Tea is to leaf as journalist is to source.

Source is to leak as Ireland is to debt.

Debt is to honor as arthritis is to psoriasis.

    
2

Wait. Isn't arthritis to psoriasis as Brazil is to Portugal?

Portugal is to fado as Boaz is to Ruth.

Ruth is to cornfield as wave is to particle.

    
3

Particle is to beach as pebble is to real estate.

Realty is to reality as sky is to earth.

Earth is to all ye know as done is to dusted.

WE LOVE THE HORSE BECAUSE ITS HAUNCH

We love the horse because its haunch

most brings to mind our own,

its back to a wall of freezing rain

that's mounting a smear campaign.

An ancient riverbed on Mars

throws up the rounded stones

prized less by quarriers

or men given to hoist the hod

than those who hope still to relaunch

a phalanx (cf.
planche
)

of Roman catapults

from a refitted aircraft carrier.

Once Roman women went so far

as to set up a cult

to rival that of great mother

Cybele, Cybele

the goddess of bee dunes and buzz drones