Brock

By Paul Muldoon b. 1951 Paul Muldoon

Small wonder

he’s not been sighted all winter;

this old brock’s

been to Normandy and back

through the tunnels and trenches

of his subconscious.

I 1 is father fell victim

to mustard-gas at the Somme;

one of his sons lost a paw

to a gin-trap at Lisbellaw:

another drills

on the Antrim hills’

still-molten lava

in a moth-eaten Balaclava.

An elaborate

system of foxholes and duckboards

leads to the terminal moraine

of an ex-linen baron’s

croquet-lawn

where he’s part-time groundsman.

I would find it somewhat infra dig

to dismiss him simply as a pig

or heed Gerald of Wales’

tall tales

of badgers keeping badger-slaves.

For when he shuffles

across the esker

I glimpse my grandfather’s whiskers

stained with tobacco-pollen.

When he piddles against a bullaun

I know he carries bovine TB

but what I see

is my father in his Sunday suit’s

bespoke lime and lignite,

patrolling his now-diminished estate

and taking stock of this and that.

Paul Muldoon, “Brock” from Poems 1968-1998. Copyright © 2001 by Paul Muldoon. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, www.fsgbooks.com. All rights reserved. Caution: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Source: Poems 1968-1998 (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2001)

Biography

Paul Muldoon is one of Ireland's leading contemporary poets. He was born in Portadown, County Armagh and raised near The Moy, in Northern Ireland. Muldoon’s work is full of paradox: playful but serious, elusive but direct, innovative but traditional. He uses traditional verse forms such as the sonnet, ballad, and dramatic monologue, but alters their length and basic structure, and uses rhyme and meter in new ways. His work is . . .

Continue reading this biography