| You made some mistake when you intended to favor me with some of the new valuable grass seed...for what you gave me...proves mere timothy. |
| ~A letter from Benjamin Franklin, 1747 |
| I |
| Midnight. June, 1923. Not a stir except for the brough and brouhaha |
| surrounding the taper or link |
| in which a louse |
| flares up and a shadow, my da's, |
| clatters against a wall of the six-by-eight-by-six-foot room |
| he sleeps in, eleven years old, a servant-boy at Hardys of |
| Carnteel. |
| There's a boot-polish lid filled with turps |
| or paraffin oil |
| under each cast-iron bed-leg, a little barrier |
| against bed-bugs under each bed-foot. |
| II |
| That knocking's the knocking against their stalls of a team |
| of six black Clydesdales mined in Coalisland |
| he's only just helped to unhitch from the cumbersome |
| star of a hay-rake. Decently and in order |
| he brought each whitewashed nose |
| to its nosebag of corn, to its galvanised bucket. |
| One of the six black Clydesdale mares |
| he helped all day to hitch and unhitch |
| was showing, on the near hock, what might be a bud of farcy |
| picked up, no doubt, while on loan to Wesley Cummins. |
| III |
| 'Decently and in order,' Cummins would proclaim, 'let all |
| Inniskillings |
| be done.' A week ago my da helped him limber up |
| the team to a mowing-machine as if to a gun-carriage. 'For no |
| | Dragoon | |
| can function without his measure of char.' |
| He patted his belly-band. 'A measure, that is, against dysentery.' |
| This was my da's signal to rush |
| into the deep shade of the hedge to fetch such little tea as might |
| | remain | |
| in the tea-urn. 'Man does not live,' Cummins would snort, 'only by |
| | scraps | |
| of wheaten farls and tea-dregs. |
| You watch your step or I'll see you're shipped back to Killeter.' |
| IV |
| 'Killeeshill,' my da says, 'I'm from Killeeshill.' Along the cast- |
| | | iron |
| rainbow of his bed-end |
| comes a line |
| of chafers or cheeselips that have scaled the bed-legs |
| despite the boot-polish lids. Eleven years of age. A servant-boy |
| on the point of falling asleep. The reek of paraffin |
| or the pinewoods reek |
| of turpentine |
| good against roundworm in horses. That knocking against their |
| | | stalls |
| of six Clydesdales, each standing at sixteen hands. |
| V |
| Building hay even now, even now drawing level with the team's head- |
| | | brass, |
| buoyed up by nothing more than the ballast |
| of hay--meadow cat's-tail, lucerne, the leaf upon trodden leaf |
| of white clover and red-- |
| drawing level now with the taper-blooms of a horse chestnut. |
| Already light in the head. |
| 'Though you speak, young Muldoon...' Cummins calls up from trimming |
| | the skirt |
| of the haycock, 'Though you speak with the tongue |
| of an angel, I see you for what you are...Malevolent. |
| Not only a member of the church malignant but a malevolent spirit.' |
| VI |
| Even now borne aloft by bearing down on lap-cocks and shake-cocks |
| from under one of which a ruddy face |
| suddenly twists and turns upwards as if itself carried |
| on a pitchfork and, meeting its gaze, |
| he sees himself, a servant-boy still, still ten or eleven, |
| breathing upon a Clydesdale's near hock and finding a farcy-bud |
| like a tiny glow in a strut of charcoal. |
| 'I see you' Cummins points at him with a pitchfork, 'you little |
| | | byblow, |
| I see you casting your spells, your sorceries, |
| I see you coming as a thief in the night to stab us in the back.' |
| VII |
| A year since they kidnapped Anketell Moutray from his home at |
| | Favour Royal, |
| dragging him, blindfolded, the length of his own gravel path, |
| eighty years old, the Orange county grand master. Four A Specials |
| | shot on a train |
| in Clones. The Clogher valley |
| a blaze of flax-mills and haysheds. Memories of the Land League. |
| Davitt and Biggar. |
| Breaking the boycott at Lough Mask. |
| The Land Leaguers beaten |
| at the second battle of Saintfield. It shall be revealed... |
| A year since they cut out the clapper of a collabor...a |
| | collabor... |
| A collaborator from Maguiresbridge. |
| VIII |
| That knocking's the team's near-distant knocking on wood |
| while my da breathes upon |
| the blue-yellow flame on a fetlock, on a deep-feathered pastern |
| of one of six black Shires... 'Because it shall be revealed by |
| | fire,' | |
| Cummin's last pitchfork is laden |
| with thistles, 'as the sparks fly upward |
| man is born into trouble. For the tongue may yet be cut |
| from an angel.' The line of cheeselips and chafers |
| along the bed-end. 'Just wait till you come back down and I get a |
| | | hold |
| of you, young Muldoon... We'll see what spells you'll cast.' |
| IX |
| For an instant it seems no one else might scale |
| such a parapet of meadow cat's-tail, lucerne, red and white |
| | | clovers, |
| not even the line of chafers and cheeselips |
| that overthrow as they undermine |
| when, light in the head, unsteady on his pegs as Anketell Moutray, |
| he squints through a blindfold of clegs |
| from his grass-capped, thistle-strewn vantage point, |
| the point where two hay-ropes cross, |
| where Cummins and his crew have left him, in a straw hat with a |
| | fraying brim, |
| while they've moved on to mark out the next haycock. |
| X |
| That next haycock already summoning itself from windrow after wind- |
| | weary windrow |
| while yet another brings itself to mind in the acrid stink |
| of turpentine. There the image of Lizzie, |
| Hardy's last servant-girl, reaches out from her dais |
| of salt hay, stretches out an unsunburned arm |
| half in bestowal, half beseechingly, then turns away to appeal |
| to all that spirit-troop |
| of hay-treaders as far as the eye can see, the coil on coil |
| of hay from which, in the taper's mild uproar, |
| they float out across the dark face of the earth, an earth without |
| | form, and void. |
Paul Muldoon, Harvard's 1997 Phi Beta Kappa poet, read "Third Epistle to Timothy" at the annual literary exercises in Sanders Theatre in June. A native of Northern Ireland who has published poetry, drama, and works for children, he has taught at Berkeley, Columbia, and the University of Massachusetts and now directs the creative writing program at Princeton University. His works include New Weather, The Annals of Chile, Meeting the British, Quoof, and New Selected Poems, 1968-1994. "Third Epistle to Timothy" was first published in the Times Literary Supplement. |
