{"id":29,"date":"2010-11-19T18:06:10","date_gmt":"2010-11-19T23:06:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/?p=29"},"modified":"2010-11-19T22:01:41","modified_gmt":"2010-11-20T03:01:41","slug":"paul-muldoon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/2010\/29\/poems\/paul-muldoon\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Muldoon – Sillyhow Stride"},"content":{"rendered":"

In memory of Warren Zevon<\/em><\/p>\n

I<\/p>\n

I want you to tell me if, on Grammy night, you didn’t get one hell of a kick
\nout of all those bling-it-ons in their bullet-proof broughams,
\nall those line-managers who couldn’t manage a line of coke,<\/p>\n

all those Barmecides offering beakers of barm \u2013
\nif you didn’t get a kick out of being as incongruous
\nthere as John Donne at a Junior Prom.<\/p>\n

Two graves must hide, Warren, thine and mine corse
\nwho, on the day we met, happened
\nalso to meet an individual dragging a full-length cross<\/p>\n

along 42nd Street and kept mum, each earning extra Brownie points
\nfor letting that cup pass. The alcoholic
\nknows that to enter in these bonds<\/p>\n

is to be free, yeah right. The young John Donne who sets a Glock
\non his dish in the cafeteria
\nknows that, even as he plots to clean some A&R man’s clock,<\/p>\n

his muse on dromedary
\ntrots to the Indias of spice and mine
\nand the Parsi Towers of Silence, even as he buses his tray<\/p>\n

with its half-eaten dish of beef chow mein
\nto the bus-station, he’s already gone half-way to meet the Space Lab.
\nThe Space <\/em>Lab (italics mine),<\/p>\n

where you worked on how many mint juleps
\nit takes to make a hangover
\nwhile playing piano for all those schlubs you could eclipse<\/p>\n

and cloud with a wink. I long to talk to some old lover’s
\nghost about the night after night you tipped the scales
\nfor the Everly Brothers,<\/p>\n

Frank and Jesse, while learning to inhale
\nthrough a French inhaler like a child soldier from the Ivory Coast
\nlearning to parch a locust on a machete, a child soldier who would e-mail<\/p>\n

you, at your request,
\na copy of \u201c Death Be Not Proud \u201d, a child soldier who would hi-lite
\na locust with a flame. If your grave be broke up again some second guest<\/p>\n

to entertain, let it serve as hallowed
\nground where those young shavers
\nfrom the Ivory Coast may find their careers, as you found yours, on hold,<\/p>\n

where Tim McGraw and OutKast, not to speak of those underachievers
\nwho don a black hat or a goatee
\nas a computer screen dons a screen-saver<\/p>\n

or the Princeton sky its seventeen-year cicadas,
\nwill find themselves on hold. You who went searching for a true, plain heart
\nas an unreconstructed renegade<\/p>\n

must have come to believe, with Frank and Jesse, no hate could hurt
\nour bodies like our love. Another low-down
\ndirty shame . . . To wicked spirits horrid<\/p>\n

shapes assigned . . . Every nickel nudging the nickelodeon.
\nO wrangling schools . . . O wrangling schools that search what fire
\nshall burn this world, had none the wit to smell Izaak Walton<\/p>\n

pressing down on Donne’s funeral pyre,
\nyeah right, to smell the locust parched by that Ivory Coast subaltern,
\nhad none the wit unto this knowledge to aspire,<\/p>\n

that this your fever, the fever that still turns
\nthe turntable, might be it? For every turn, like every tuning, is open,
\nevery thorn a durian,<\/p>\n

every \u201cbin\u201d a \u201cben\u201d
\non the outskirts of Jerusalem. Such a pilgrimage were sweet,
\nWarren, barreling down the autobahn<\/p>\n

through West Hollywood
\nin your little black Corvette (part-barge,
\npart hermaphrodite brig), our eyes set not on the noted weed<\/p>\n

but the noted sea<\/em>weed of Nobu Matsuhisa. Those child soldiers who parch
\na locust on a machete while tending a .50 caliber
\nBrowning with a dodgy breech<\/p>\n

will know how the blood labors
\nto beget Matsuhisa-san’s seared toro<\/em>. At the winter solstice, as I filed
\npast a band of ticket-scalpers<\/p>\n

who would my ruined fortune flout
\nat Madison Square Garden, I glimpsed a man in a Tibetan
\ncap, nay-saying a flute,<\/p>\n

whom I took at first to be an older Brian Jones, what with his flipping a butane
\nlighter in my face and saying, \u201cI shall be made thy music . . .\u201d
\nAt that very moment, quite unbidden,<\/p>\n

the ghost of Minoru Yamasaki
\n(who had trailed me from the bar at Nobu) exhorted me to \u201cTurn them speakers
\nup full blast now Lucies<\/em>, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks,<\/p>\n

is sunk so low as my Twin Towers . . .\u201d. Brian Jones’s patent winkle-pickers
\nreflected a patent sky. \u201cAll strange wonders that befell
\nme while the rest of them recorded Beggars
\n<\/em>
\nBanquet<\/em> and I was sunk so low in Twickenham, lovers coming with crystal vials
\nto take my tears . . .\u201d. \u201cI’ll do my crying in the rain
\nwith Don and Phil,\u201d<\/p>\n

said Yamasaki-san, \u201cI’ll do my crying with Frank and Jesse waiting for a train . . .
\nThose lines you wrote about the blood-bath
\nat my Twin Towers, about the sky being full of carrion,<\/p>\n

those were my<\/em> Twin Towers, right?\u201d Brian, meanwhile, continued to puff
\non the flute as if he were indeed corporeal,
\nas if he were no less substantial than the elder-pith<\/p>\n

nay on which he played a hurry home early
\nversion of \u201cWalk Right Back\u201d, the \u201cWalk Right Back\u201d
\nyou yourself had played night after night with Frank and Jesse Everly.<\/p>\n

II<\/p>\n

I knelt beside my sister’s bed, Warren, the valleys and the peaks
\nof the EKGs, the crepusculine X-rays,
\nthe out-of-date blister-packs<\/p>\n

discarded by those child soldiers from the Ivory Coast or Zaire,
\nand couldn’t think that she had sunk so low
\nshe might not make the anniversary<\/p>\n

of our mother’s death from this same cancer, this same quick, quick, slow
\nconversion of manna to gall
\nfrom which she died thirty years ago. I knelt and adjusted the sillyhow<\/p>\n

of her oxygen mask, its vinyl caul
\nunlikely now to save Maureen from drowning in her own spit.
\nI thought of how the wrangling schools<\/p>\n

need look no further than her bed
\nto find what fire shall burn this world \u2013 or that heaven
\nwhich \u201cis one with\u201d this world \u2013 to find how gold to airy thinness beat<\/p>\n

may crinkle like cellophane
\nin a flame, like cellophane or the flimmerings of gauze
\nby which a needle is held fast in a vein.<\/p>\n

So break off, Warren, break off this last lamenting kiss
\nas Christ broke with Iscariot
\nand gave himself to those loosey-goosey<\/p>\n

Whisky A Go Going mint julep- and margarita-
\nand gimlet-grinders, those gin fizz-
\niognomists. My first guitar, a Cort, and my first amp, a Crate,<\/p>\n

I myself had tried to push through a Fuzz Face
\nor some shit-kicking stomp box
\ntill I blew every fuse<\/p>\n

in Central New Jersey. At the autumnal equinox
\nas on St Lucies when sunbeams in the east are spread
\nI’d pretend the Crate was a Vox<\/p>\n

AC-50 Super Twin. I was playing support
\nfor some star in the unchangeable firmament
\nin which the flesh, Warren, is merely a bruise on the spirit,<\/p>\n

a warm-up for the main event
\nas the hymnal ushers in the honky-tonk
\nor the oxygen tent<\/p>\n

raises the curtain on the oxygen mask. How well you knew that dank
\nspot on the outskirts
\nof Jerusalem where the kids still squeeze between the tanks<\/p>\n

to suck the life out of a cigarette,
\nthe maple-bud in spring like something coming to a head,
\nsome pill that can’t be sugared,<\/p>\n

another hit
\nof hooch or horse that double-ties the subtile knot
\nto which we’ve paid so little heed<\/p>\n

all those years of running amuck in Kent.
\nGo tell court-huntsmen that the oxygen-masked King will ride
\nten thousand days and nights<\/p>\n

on a stride piano, yeah right,
\nthrough the hell in which Ignatius of \u201cIgnatius His Conclave\u201d
\nwas strung out on Mandrax and mandrake root,<\/p>\n

ten thousand nights of the \u201cchemical life\u201d
\n(as Auden styled it, turning the speakers up full blast),
\nthe \u201cchemical life\u201d that gives way to ten thousand days of rehab and golf<\/p>\n

in the afternoon, televangelists,
\npush up and bench press with Buddhist and Parsi,
\nten thousand days after which you realized<\/p>\n

the flesh is indeed no more than a bruise
\non the spirit. The werewolf with the Japanese menu in his hand,
\nkeen as he was to show his prowess<\/p>\n

with the chopsticks, realized it ain’t
\nthat pretty, ain’t that pretty at all
\nto be completely wasted when you’re testing your chops, hint hint,<\/p>\n

on a Gibson Les Paul
\noverdriven through a Fender Vibratone,
\nain’t that pretty to crawl<\/p>\n

to Ensenada for methadone.
\nWere we not weaned till then from Mandrax and mandrake
\nor snorted we in the seven sleepers’ den
\na line of coke, or wore long sleeves to cover the wreak
\nof injecting diacetylmorphine?
\nI was playing a Fender through a Marshall rig<\/p>\n

that was so massively overdriven
\nI couldn’t hear the phone ring, didn’t hear that excitable boy
\nextol the virtues of Peruvian<\/p>\n

over Bolivian marching powder, that excitable hula-hula<\/em> boy,
\nthe Jackson Browne sound-alike,
\nwho waited on us in Nobu (Nobu or Koi?)<\/p>\n

where the fishionistas (sic) walked the catwalk
\nfor as long as they could manage a line
\nof coke with their sushi deluxe,<\/p>\n

for as long as they were able for the baby abalone
\nwith garlic sauce. We watched those two parascenders parascend
\noff Malibu like two true, plain<\/p>\n

hearts who struggle to fend
\noff the great crash \u2013 two true, plain hearts like yourself and Maureen
\nwho struggled to fend off the great crash that has us end<\/p>\n

where we began, all strung out on heroin
\non the outskirts of La Caldera,
\nour last few grains of heroin-ash stashed in a well-wrought urn.<\/p>\n

III<\/p>\n

I want you to tell me, Warren, if you didn’t watch those two hang-gliders
\nand think of the individual we saw drag
\nhis full-length cross through the under-the-counter-culture<\/p>\n

of 42nd Street? 42nd or Canal? A certain individual, whatreck,
\nwho might easily have taken in a 4 a.m. show at the Clark and got to grips
\nwith the usherette’s leg in the dark,<\/p>\n

who might have recognized the usherette for a certain demirep
\nwho’d registered her domain
\nin the Adelphi, having already learned the ropes<\/p>\n

from the old bluesmen
\nwho played in the Blue Note. That must have been your first brush
\nwith greatness, in Chicago, before the mean<\/p>\n

streets of LA where your Moses met the bulrush
\nof Stravinsky and every chord became a cordon sanitaire
\nagainst the bum’s rush<\/p>\n

your Russian Jewish father had given you in Culver and Century
\nCities, your G major seeing his G major
\nin gloves-off gambling, and though music did in the center<\/p>\n

sit right through that Wanderjahre
\n<\/em>with Stravinsky, I’m certain it would also lean and hearken
\nafter the jubilation and the jeers<\/p>\n

of the boxing ring in which your father took on some cocksure Puerto Rican,
\nin which every Baby Grand cried out for a Crybaby
\nand the Everlasting Life we bargain<\/p>\n

for was invented by some record company Pooh-Bah
\nwho has forgotten, in the midst of things,
\nthat every operation’s mom-and-pop,<\/p>\n

your Scottish Mormon mother teaching you the right swing
\nagainst your father’s left, your common
\nG on the Chickering<\/p>\n

sounding against the G-men
\nwho plagued him about that pyramid scheme he set up in the Faeroes
\nwith Mr Cambio and Mr Gombeen.<\/p>\n

I want you to tell me if grief, brought to numbers, cannot be so fierce,
\npace Donne’s sales pitch,
\nfor he tames, that fetters it in verse,
\nthrowing up a last ditch
\nagainst the mounted sorrows, for I have more, Warren, I have more,
\nmore as an even flame two hearts did touch<\/p>\n

and left us mere
\nphilosophers whose blood still labors to beget
\nchild-soldiers toasting locust S’mores,<\/p>\n

the A&R men lining their pockets
\nwhile Roland battled the Bantu to their knees,
\nthe Bantu who boogie-woogied<\/p>\n

with Saint Ignatius
\nthrough their post traumatic stress disorder,
\nthe Les Paul pushed through a Pignose<\/p>\n

like a, yeah right, Rotorooter
\nthrough a sewage line, the A&R men taking the mazuma
\nand crossing the border<\/p>\n

to load up on sashimi
\nwith Yamasaki-san, a headless Childe Roland
\ncoming to his dark twin Towers of Silence, zoom zoom,<\/p>\n

those Towers the Parsis still delineate
\nas scaffolds for sky-burial, a quorum
\nof vultures letting their time-chastened lant<\/p>\n

fall to their knees as they hold on like grim
\ndeath to the bellied-up Brian Jones, their office indulgently to fit
\nactives to passives in the doldrums<\/p>\n

of the swimming-pool, the fishionistas (qv<\/em>) with their food fads
\nhaving nothing on these rare
\nbirds that divide<\/p>\n

the spoils, Warren, these rare
\nbirds that divide the spoils
\nwith the gasbag, gobshite, gumptionless A&R<\/p>\n

men who couldn’t tell a hollow-body Les Paul with double-coil
\npickups pushed through a Princeton Reverb
\nfrom a slab of London broil<\/p>\n

an excitable boy might rub
\nall over his chest, the vultures working piecemeal
\nat his chest like the chest on which a Russian Jewish cardsharp<\/p>\n

and a Scottish Mormon broke the seal
\nas surely as one VIP opening her bosom made one Viper Room
\nan everywhere, every Glock sighing for a glockenspiel,<\/p>\n

every frame a freeze-frame
\nof two alcoholics barreling down to Ensenada
\nin a little black Corvette, vroom vroom,<\/p>\n

for Diet, yeah right, Diet<\/em> Mountain Dew,
\nthat individual carrying his cross knowing the flesh is a callus
\non the spirit as surely as you knew the mesotheliomata<\/p>\n

on both lungs meant the situation was lose-lose,
\nevery full-length cross-carrier almost certainly up to some sort of high jinks
\nelse a great Prince in prison lies,<\/p>\n

lies belly-up on a Space Lab scaffold where the turkey buzzards pink
\nMatsuhisa-san’s seared toro<\/em>,
\nturkey buzzards waiting for you to eclipse and cloud them with a wink<\/p>\n

as they hold out their wings and of the sun his working vigor borrow
\nbefore they parascend through the Viper Room or the Whiskey A Go Go,
\neach within its own \u201ccleansing breeze\u201d, its own cathartes aura<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[Published in The Times Literary Supplement<\/em>, June 2, 2006.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In memory of Warren Zevon I I want you to tell me if, on Grammy night, you didn’t get one hell of a kick out of all those bling-it-ons in their bullet-proof broughams, all those line-managers who couldn’t manage a line of coke, all those Barmecides offering beakers of barm \u2013 if you didn’t get […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poems","category-4-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":239,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions\/239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}