September 29, 2009
“@”
Like the whorl of an out-of-this-world ear that had been lent
to an oak-gall wasp by a tenth century Irish monk
who would hold out oak-gall ink against the predicament
in which he found himself…
                   Â
                    Like the ever-unfolding trunk
of the elephant in the room that gives such a bad vibe
it vies with your old hippie girlfriend who once lent such weight
to any argument to which you feared she might subscribe,
including her insistence we abbreviateÂ
our most promising rlshps…
                    Like the scrolled-down tail
of a Capuchin monkey drawing on its inner strengths
as it hammers short-sighted snail against short-sighted snail
that has nonetheless gone to extraordinary lengths…
Like the tapeworm swallowed by a hippie who was once fat
but is now kind of bummed out you’ve lost track of where she’s at.
Special permission has been granted by the author for Design Observer to reprint this poem online. Originally published in The New Republic.
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By Paul Muldoon
Paul Muldoon was in born in Northern Ireland and educated at the Queen’s University of Belfast. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is a Professor at Princeton University. In 2007 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. His most recent book is Horse Latitudes: Poems.
