Paul Muldoon

 

Lunch with Pancho Villa

I 

'Is it really a revolution, though?' 
I reached across the wicker table 
With another $10,000 question. 
My celebrated pamphleteer, 
Co-author of such volumes 
As Blood on the Rose, 
The Dream and the Drums, 
And How It Happened Here, 
Would pour some untroubled Muscatel 
And settle back in his cane chair. 

'Look, son. Just look around you. 
People are getting themselves killed 
Left, right and centre 
While you do what? Write rondeaux? 
There's more to living in this country 
Than stars and horses, pigs and trees, 
Not that you'd guess it from your poems. 
Do you never listen to the news? 
You want to get down to something true, 
Something a little nearer home.' 

I called again later that afternoon, 
A quiet suburban street. 
'You want to stand back a little 
When the world's at your feet.' 
I'd have liked to have heard some more 
Of his famous revolution. 
I rang the bell, and knocked hard 
On what I remembered as his front door, 
That opened then, as such doors do, 
Directly on to a back yard. 

II 

Not any back yard, I'm bound to say, 
And not a thousand miles away 
From here. No one's taken in, I'm sure, 
By such a mild invention. 
But where (I wonder myself) do I stand, 
In relation to a table and chair, 
The quince tree I forgot to mention, 
That suburban street, the door, the yard— 
All made up as I went along 
As things that people live among. 

And such a person as lived there! 
My celebrated pamphleteer! 
Of course, I gave it all away 
With those preposterous titles. 
The Bloody Rose? The Dream and the Drums? 
The three-day wonder of the flowering plum! 
Or was I desperately wishing 
To have been their other co-author, 
Or, at least, to own a first edition 
Of The Boot Boys and Other Battles? 

'When are you going to tell the truth?' 
For there's no such book, so far as I know, 
As How it Happened Here, 
Though there may be. There may. 
What should I say to this callow youth 
Who learned to write last winter— 
One of those correspondence courses— 
And who's coming to lunch today? 
He'll be rambling on, no doubt, 
About pigs and trees, stars and horses.