Brock

By 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.

His 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, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.

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