A Hare at Aldergrove Paul Muldoon A hare standing up at last on his own two feet in the blasted(枯萎的,被害的) grass by the runway may trace his lineage(血统,家系) to the great assembly of hares that, in the face of what might well have looked like defeat, would, in 1963 or so, migrate here from the abandoned airfield at Nutt's Corner, not long after Marilyn Monroe overflowed from her body stocking in Something's Got to Give. These hares have themselves so long been given to row against the flood that when a King of the Hares has tried to ban bare knuckle(关节,指节) fighting, so wont are they to grumble(抱怨) and gripe(牢骚) about what will be acceptable and what won't they've barely noticed that the time is ripe for them to shake off the din of a pack of hounds that has caught their scent and take in that enormity(暴行,极恶) just as I've taken in how my own DNA is 87% European and East Asian 13%. So accustomed had they now grown to a low-level human hum that, despite the almost weekly atrocity(凶恶,残暴) in which they'd lost one of their own to a wheeled blade, they followed the herd towards this eternal city as if they'd had a collective change of heart. My own heart swells now as I watch him nibble on a shoot of blaeberry(覆盆子) or heather(石南花) while smoothing out a chart by which he might divine if our Newark-bound 757 will one day overshoot the runway about which there so often swirled rumors of Messerschmitts. Clapper-lugged, cleft-lipped, he looks for all the world as if he might never again put up his mitts despite the fact that he shares a Y chromosome(染色体) with Niall of the Nine Hostages, never again allow his om to widen and deepen by such easy stages, never relaunch his campaign as melanoma(黑素瘤) has relaunched its campaign in a friend I once dated, her pain rising above the collective pain with which we've been inundated(淹没) as this one or that has launched an attack to the slogan of "Brits Out" or "Not an Inch" or a dull ack-ack starting up in the vicinity of Ballynahinch, looking for all the world as if he might never again get into a fluster(慌乱,混乱) over his own entrails, never again meet luster with luster in the eye of my dying friend, never establish what truly ails another woman with a flesh wound found limping where a hare has only just been shot, never again bewitch(迷惑,蛊惑) the milk in the churn, never swoon as we swooned when Marilyn's white halter-top dress blew up in The Seven Year Itch, in a flap now only as to whether we should continue to tough it out till something better comes along or settle for this salad of blaeberry and heather and a hint of common tormentil(直立委陵菜) . |