IRISH HISTORY

For Paul Muldoon

Ah, Irish History

you remind me of Finbarr

whose pipe was like

Bogtown's once famously triple-shift factory

exhaling shape-shifting billows of chemical smoke

floating over the neighbourhood and in through the draftholes

to bedrooms of asthmatic children sleeping three to a single

twenty-four hours a night. Acceptably sick like the rest of us,

zig-zagging along the invincible old roads, occasional new roads,

dodging boy racers and delivery trucks.

Well, Finbarr, most of them anyway.

Planning to snuff somewhere cosy

and local with white puffy pillows, dry linen, whispering sirens dressed up as nurses,

soft-chorusing rosary nuns

and docs that crack jokes

while pitting you into the blindness in the middle of your forehead

where no-one can follow you, out of your senses for good.

Then you went missing,

as in you ran out the door flootered,

screaming lighting abuse, and you never came back to your fat daughter's lisp,

your conjoined triplet boys (besides the nineteen who died),

your respectably chain-smoking wife, your religious appearances

in the Pub on Sunday mornings

for rebel singsong and barrels of stout

with all the other veterans of nothing much.

Two decades pass through the needle of your vanishing.

Reports of you are unbelievably thin.

One punter claims he tagged you at Ascot

in 2006 in a scarf made of fox, unpuffing an electronic cigarette,

hand in hand with your alternative, extravagantly-hatted wife,

strolling along all at ease through the toffs; also sporting your daughter,

the chef-de-partie and theatrical actress and the son that's high up in the airforce.

But I know you are dying in dark visions and fits in an abandoned industrial unit

on the outskirts of Manchester

with your rummaging Aberdeen girlfriend,

full of pills made in Hoxley and vintage vomit, syphillis breeding with TB

inside you like those gigantic pursuing Norvegicus

that swam in the wake

of your ferry, Saint Patrick II.

I'm one of those plague-driven rats

though you’ve seen

me on your travels as a mongrel devouring a rabbit out by

the dump, an ox on the high-street,

a skybluish aura ‘round an old medallion

sown into the pocket of the thirteenth-hand-coat you got passed through the Sallies

by some long-dead slop-guzzler's schizophrenic granny

whom the priest said - at the very small gathering

- had a special devotion to Mary.

I'm here to let you know that your toothless Bogtown wife

might have set her hair on fire in bed last night

but it didn't take as long as you might think. Your daughter – who still misses you deeply -

is babbling away,

like an oracle of even less

having gone permanently

daft as well as half-blind

from plonk she goes stroking

one week from Aldi, Lidl the next,

besides being Nana to seventy-seven (as well as ninety that died)

who’ve evolved from asthmatic to an argot of spittle and cough.

You have one son left

because he hacked off the other two

with a saw

made of mother's lost teeth.

He had to - I know; sometimes

shard and excrement by chance or fate

or ecstasy will sprout

and shove the nethermost to light.

He seems be recovering. You won't be. Goodnight.