Read an Excerpt
Moy Sand and Gravel
By Paul Muldoon Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2002 Paul Muldoon
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7980-5
CHAPTER 1
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.
V
"It had always been my sense," I hear him still, "that the goat fades into the
goad
and the spur fades into the flank
and the fastness fades into no fixed abode
and the Black Pig's Dyke fades into the piggy bank
and your Hams fade into your Japheths
and the point fades into the point-blank
and the Cristal fades into the crystal meths
where the ends somehow begin to fade into the means
and the sheugh fades into the shibboleth
and the timbre fades into the tambourine
and the quiddity fades into the quid pro quo
and — you'll like this, I know — the bourne fades into the boreen."
MOY SAND AND GRAVEL
To come out of the Olympic Cinema and be taken aback
by how, in the time it took a dolly to travel
along its little track
to the point where two movie stars' heads
had come together smackety-smack
and their kiss filled the whole screen,
those two great towers directly across the road
at Moy Sand and Gravel
had already washed, at least once, what had flowed
or been dredged from the Blackwater's bed
and were washing it again, load by load,
as if washing might make it clean.
THE MISFITS
If and when I did look up, the sky over the Moy was the very same
gray-blue
as the slow lift
of steam-smoke over the seam
of manure on a midwinter morning. I noticed the splash of red lead
on my left boot as again and again I would bend
my knee and bury my head in the rich
black earth the way an ostrich
was rumored to bury its head. My hands were blue
with cold. Again and again I would bend
to my left and lift
by one handle a creel of potatoes — King Edwards, gray as lead —
mined from what would surely seem
to any nine- or ten-year-old an inexhaustible seam.
My father wore a bag-apron that read, in capital letters, RICH.
My own capital idea, meanwhile, had sunk like a lead
balloon. "Blow all you like," my father turned on me. "Talk till you're blue
in the face. I won't let you take a lift
from the Monk. Blow all you like. I won't bend."
The Monk had spent twenty-odd years as a priest in South Bend,
his face priest-smooth except for a deep seam
in his left cheek. Fred Grew said something strange about how he liked to
"lift
his shirttail." Jack Grimley chipped in with how he was "ostrich-
sized" because he once lent Joe Corr a book called Little Boy Blue.
When Fred Grew remarked on his having "no lead
in his pencil," I heard myself say, cool as cool, "I think you've all been
misled."
At which the RICHARDSON'S TWO-SWARD suddenly began to unbend
in that distinctive pale blue
lettering as the seam
of his bag-apron unstitched itself and my father turned on me again:
"That's rich,
all right. If you think, after that, I'd let the Monk give you a lift
into the Moy to see Montgomery bloody Clift
you've another think coming. I'll give him two barrels full of twelve-gauge
lead
if he comes anywhere near you. Bloody popinjay. Peacock. Ostrich."
All I could think of was how the Monk was now no more likely to show me
how to bend
that note on the guitar — "like opening a seam
straight into your heart" — when he played Bessie Smith's "Cold in Hand
Blues"
than an ostrich to bend
its lead-plumed wings and, with its two-toed foot, rip out the horizon seam
and lift off, somehow, into the blue.
THE BRAGGART
He sucked, he'll have you know,
the telltale sixth toe
of a woman who looked like a young Marilyn Monroe,
her hubby getting a little stroppy
when he found them there in the back of that old jalopy.
Other papers please copy.
THE WHINNY
When he veered into the mirror to fix his collar stud
he heard the whinny
of a stallion at stud,
saw the egg-yellow gloss in the coat of a young ass or hinny
or a pit pony's glossy forelock
not unlike his own. A stable lad had already tried to pick
the lock
on his near hind hoof. All spick-
and-span then, turned out in the yard,
with the prepuce
of his yard
an unprepossessing puce,
he knew he'd have to buck
the trend
of these stud collars, ordered from Sears Roebuck
at year's end
by one or other of his American "aunts,"
knew he'd have to surmount
the twits and taunts
of the stable lad who'd watched him mount
the dais, dressed to the nines,
to take the prize for Geography. "You can't tell, I'll own,
the Pennines from the Apennines,
you little shit-your-knickers,"
he heard the pit pony vet
him over his own shoulder, his voice now full-blown,
now fading into the velvet
among the other snorts and snickers.
A COLLEGELANDS CATECHISM
Which is known as the "Orchard County"?
Which as the "Garden State"?
Which captain of the Bounty
was set adrift by his mate?
Who cooked and ate an omelette
midway across Niagara Falls?
Where did Setanta get
those magical hurley balls
he ram-stammed down the throat
of the blacksmith's hound?
Why would a Greek philosopher of note
refuse to be bound
by convention but live in a tub
from which he might overhear,
as he went to rub
an apple on his sleeve, the mutineers
plotting to seize the Maid of the Mist
while it was still half able to forge
ahead and make half a fist
of crossing the Niagara gorge,
the tub in which he might light a stove
and fold the beaten
eggs into themselves? Who unearthed the egg-trove?
And who, having eaten
the omelette, would marvel at how the Mounties
had so quickly closed in on him, late
of the "Orchard County"
by way of the "Garden State"?
BEAGLES
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 guiders turning and twisting after the twists and turns
of the great hare who had just now sauntered into the yard where I stood
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.
TELL
He opens the scullery door, and a sudden rush
of wind, as raw as raw,
brushes past him as he himself will brush
past the stacks of straw
that stood in earlier for Crow
or Comanche tepees hung with scalps
but tonight pass muster, row upon row,
for the foothills of the Alps.
He opens the door of the peeling shed
just as one of the apple peelers —
one of almost a score
of red-cheeked men who pare
and core
the red-cheeked apples for a few spare
shillings — mutters something about "bloodshed"
and the "peelers."
The red-cheeked men put down their knives
at one and the same
moment. All but his father, who somehow connives
to close one eye as if taking aim
or holding back a tear,
and shoots him a glance
he might take, as it whizzes past his ear,
for another Crow, or Comanche, lance
hurled through the Tilley-lit
gloom of the peeling shed,
were he not to hear what must be an apple split
above his head.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Moy Sand and Gravel by Paul Muldoon. Copyright © 2002 Paul Muldoon. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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