Read Online One Thousand Things Worth Knowing by Paul Muldoon - Free Book Online Page B

not once but thrice. I want that coffin to cut a notch
    in my clavicle. Be they “lace curtain” or “shanty,”
    Irish Americans still hold a dirge chanter
    in the highest esteem. That, and to stand in an otter’s stead.
    The chiastic structure of the book of Daniel
    mimics a double ax-head.
    As with the stubble, so with the finger- and toenails.
    I cannot thole the thought of Seamus Heaney dead.
    In South Derry as in the coalfields of South Shields
    a salmon has been known to dance along a chariot pole.
    In the way we swap “scuttle” for “scupper”
    we’re flummoxed as much by the insidiousness of firedamp
    as our sneaking regard for Rommel.
    I think of an otter cortege
    passing under a colonnade of fig trees
    barren despite their show of foliage.
    We know neither the day nor the hour of our summons.
    The same Cuthbert of Lindisfarne
    whose body will be carried aloft by monks fleeing those same Danes.
    Mountbatten of Burma. Montgomery of Alamein.
    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