Read an Excerpt

HARD DRIVE

With my back to the wall
and a foot in the door
and my shoulder to the wheel
I would drive through Seskinore.

With an ear to the ground
and my neck on the block
I would tend to my wound
in Belleek and Bellanaleck.

With a toe in the water
and a nose for trouble
and an eye to the future
I would drive through Derryfubble

and Dunnamanagh and Ballynascreen,
keeping that wound green.

UNAPPROVED ROAD

I

When we came to the customs post at Aughnacloy, as at Cullaville or
Pettigoe,
I was holding my breath
as if I might yet again be about to go

underwater . . . The fortieth
anniversary of 1916 had somehow fizzled out, the New Year's Eve attack
on Brookeborough ending in the deaths

of O'Hanlon and South, while Dev was likely to bring back
internment without trial . . . As we drew
level with the leveled shack

I was met by another black-coated, long fellow, though he wore a sky-blue
winding-cloth or scarf
wrapped round his mouth and nose, leaving only a slit for him to peer
through.

II

"In the late fifties I was looking for a place," he nestled his coffee cup on its zarf
and turned to me, thirty years later, in Rotterdam . . .
"An ancestral place . . . A place my ancestors knew as Scairbh

na gCaorach." "Scairbh na gCaorach" I chewed on my foul madams,
"is now better known as 'Emyvale'
though the Irish name means 'the sheep-steeps' or 'the rampart of rams.' "

" 'Rampart of rams?' That makes sense. It was the image of an outcrop of
shale
with a particularly sheer
drop that my ancestors, the 'people of the veil,'

held before them as they drove their flocks from tier to tier
through Algeria, Mali, and Libya all the way up to Armagh, Monaghan, and
Louth
with — you'll like this — a total disregard for any frontier."

III

"Patrick Regan?" A black-coated R.U.C. man was unwrapping a scarf from
his mouth

and flicking back and forth from my uncle's license to his face.
"Have you any news of young Sean South?

The last I heard he was suffering from a bad case
of lead poisoning. Maybe he's changed his name to Gone West?"
I knew rightly he could trace

us by way of that bottle of Redbreast
under my seat, that carton of Players, that bullion chest of butter.
I knew rightly we'd fail each and every test

they might be preparing behind the heavy iron shutters
even now being raised aloft
by men carrying belt saws and blowtorches and bolt cutters.

IV

As he turned to me again, thirty years later in Rotterdam, the Tuareg doffed
his sky-blue scarf "Back in those days I saw no risk
in sleeping under hedges. As a matter of fact I preferred a thorn hedge to a
hayloft

because — you'll like this — it reminded me of the tamarisks
along the salt route into Timbuktu."
He crossed his forearms lightly under his armpits as if he might be about
to frisk

himself, then smiled as he handed me the sky-blue
winding-cloth and a clunking water gourd.
"it had been my understanding that Scairbh na gCaorach meant 'the
crossing of ewes'

for scairbh means not 'a ledge' but 'a ford' or, more specifically, 'a
shallow ford.' "
And he immediately set off at a jog trot down an unapproved road near Aughnacloy or Swanlinbar or
Lifford.

Copyright © 2002 Paul Muldoon