The Misfits

Moy Sand and Gravel by Paul Muldoon
Buy Moy Sand and Gravel at Public domain

If and when I did look up, the sky over the Moy was the very same gray-blue
as the slow lift
of steam-smoke over the seam
of manure on a mid-winter morning. I noticed the splash of red lead
on my left boot as again and again I would bend
my knee and bury my head in the rich

black earth the way an ostrich
was rumored to bury its head. My hands were blue
with cold. Again and again I would bend
to my left and lift
by one handle a creel of potatoes - King Edwards, gray as lead -
mined from what would surely seem

to any nine- or ten-year-old an inexhaustible seam.
My father wore a bag-apron that read, in capital letters, 'RICH'.
My own capital idea, meanwhile, had sunk like a lead
balloon. 'Blow all you like,' my father turned on me. 'Talk till you're blue
in the face. I won't let you take a lift
from the Monk. Blow all you like. I won't bend.'

The Monk had spent twenty-odd years as a priest in South Bend,
his face priest-smooth except for a deep seam
in his left cheek. Fred Grew said something strange about how he liked to 'lift
his shirt-tail'. Jack Grimley chipped in with how he was 'ostrich-
sized' because he once lent Joe Corr a book called Little Boy Blue.
When Fred Grew remarked on his having 'no lead

in his pencil', I heard myself say, cool as cool, 'I think you've all been misled.'
At which the RICHARDSON'S TWO-SWARD suddenly began to unbend
in that distinctive pale blue
lettering as the seam
of his bag-apron unstitched itself and my father turned on me again: 'That's rich,
all right. If you think, after that, I'd let the Monk give you a lift

into the moy to see Montgomery bloody Clift
you've another think coming. I'll give him two barrels full of twelve-gauge lead
if he comes anywhere near you. Bloody popinjay. Peacock. Ostrich.'
All I could think of was how the Monk was now no more likely to show me how to bend
that note on the guitar - 'like opening a seam
straight into your heart'- when he played Bessie Smith's 'Cold in Hand Blues'

than an ostrich to bend
its lead-plumed wings and, with its two-toed foot, rip out the horizon-seam
and lift off, somehow, into the blue.

· From Moy Sand and Gravel, published by Faber at £14.99