THE GLASS ESSAY / 2867
My father tilts least, I am proud of him. 115 Hi Dad how y'doing? His face cracks open it could be a grin or rage
and looking past me he issues a stream of vehemence at the air. My mother lays her hand on his. Hello love, she says. He jerks his hand away. We sit.
120 Sunlight flocks through the room. Mother begins to unpack from her handbag the things she has brought for him, grapes, arrowroot biscuits, humbugs.0 hard candies
He is addressing strenuous remarks to someone in the air between us. He uses a language known only to himself, 125 made of snarls and syllables and sudden wild appeals.
Once in a while some old formula floats up through the wash? You don't say! or Happy birthday to you!? but no real sentence
for more than three years now. BO I notice his front teeth are getting black. I wonder how you clean the teeth of mad people.
He always took good care of his teeth. My mother looks up. She and I often think two halves of one thought. Do you remember that gold-plated toothpick
135 you sent him from Harrod's4 the summer you were in London? she asks. Yes I wonder what happened to it. Must be in the bathroom somewhere.
She is giving him grapes one by one. They keep rolling out of his huge stiff fingers. MO He used to be a big man, over six feet tall and strong,
but since he came to hospital his body has shrunk to the merest bone
house? except the hands. The hands keep growing. Each one now as big as a boot in Van Gogh,5
they go lumbering after the grapes in his lap. 145 But now he turns to me with a rush of urgent syllables that break off on a high note?he waits,
staring into my face. That quizzical look. One eyebrow at an angle. I have a photograph taped to my fridge at home.
4. Department store. 5. Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Dutch postimpressionist, painted A Pair of Boots (1887).
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286 8 / PAUL MULDOON
150 It shows his World War II air crew posing in front of the plane. Hands firmly behind backs, legs wide apart, chins forward.
Dressed in the puffed flying suits with a wide leather strap pulled tight through the crotch. 155 They squint into the brilliant winter sun of 1942.
It is dawn. They are leaving Dover6 for France. My father on the far left is the tallest airman,
with his collar up, 160 one eyebrow at an angle. The shadowless light makes him look immortal,
for all the world like someone who will not weep again. He is still staring into my face. Flaps down! I cry.
165 His black grin flares once and goes out like a match.
1995
Epitaph: Zion1
Murderous little world once our objects had gazes. Our lives Were fragile, the wind Could dash them away. Here lies the refugee breather Who drank a bowl of elsewhere.
2000
6. Port on the English Channel. homeland; in Christianity, a heavenly or ideal city 1. In the Hebrew Bible the eastern hill of Jerusa- of faith, lem. In Judaism it came to symbolize a promised
PAUL MULDOON
b. 1951 Paul Muldoon was born in Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland. His mother was a schoolteacher; his father, a farm laborer and mushroom grower. He grew up in, as he put it, 'a little enclave of Roman Catholics living within the predominantly Protestant parish of Loughgall, the village where the Orange Order was founded in 1795.' Despite inheriting strong Republican sympathies, he depicts the Catholic Church unsympathetically, even going so far as to state that there is 'a very fine line between organized religion and organized crime.' He was educated at the primary school in Collegelands (where his mother taught); St. Patrick's College, Armagh; and Queen's University, Belfast, where he was tutored by Seamus Heaney and came to know other poets of the 'Belfast Group,' such as Derek Mahon and
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MEETING THE BRITISH / 286 9
Michael Longley. He worked as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation in Belfast until, in the mid-1980s, he became a freelance writer and moved to the United States, where he teaches at Princeton University.
Muldoon's first published poems were written in Irish, and although he soon switched to English, Irish words and phrases continued to appear in his work. As with many other Irish poets, America soon loomed large in his imagination. Excited by American films, he adapted cinematic techniques in hectic, hallucinatory long poems. Other poems, such as 'Meeting the British,' parallel the plight of American Indians with that of Northern Irish Catholics. Still others, such as 'The Grand Conversation,' turn his marriage to the American Jewish writer Jean Korelitz into a densely specific yet allegorical poem about identity and intercultural experience. His earliest literary influence was, he said, Robert Frost's 'strong, classic, lyric line. But the most important thing . . . was his mischievous, shy, multi-
