Mustanbih

for Peter van de Kamp

Mustanbih: an Arabic word for a Bedouin who entices dogs to bark by imitating them, especially when he is lost in the desert at night trying to find a camp – perhaps his own camp. Often it’s not a dog but another lost Bedouin who answers him.

I am giving voice now for twenty years

and my echo – a rare thing –

has been swallowed by the last bog.

I am more lonely than the tasteless dew I drink

to keep hoarseness at bay.

I know in my wheezing heart

that it’s in endless circles I’m walking

and to tell the truth

I might as well have kept my mouth shut

stared long at the stars

and stretched out to die quietly.

My country is foreign to me.

Let them all be poured into a pot,

all those old place names, boil them

until the poison of unfamiliarity

is drained from every bitter syllable.

The blackbird speaks pure gibberish.

Plants have forgotten their own secrets.

The Man in the Moon has disappeared overseas.

The rain doesn’t cleanse my skin.

The sun after it doesn’t dry me.

Stone alignments send me astray.

Nora-the-Bog* can’t show me the way.

I have long forgotten

what signs I must watch for.

In Kerry I whined like a pup,

in Tipperary I spoke like a wolf,

in Kildare like a hunting beagle,

like a gentle hound at the Border.

At a golf course in Clare

a politician showed his teeth to me,

a man who wouldn’t know Oscar’s sword –

the Bodyslicer –

from his own golf-club.

East of Waterford, a Dutchman strings barbed wire

and a sign in English barks

KEEP OUT!

Along the Shannon’s tributaries 3,000 fish rot.

I heard a whisper in Glenasmole

that put the heart crossways in me:

Patrick, the Adze-Head, slagging off Oisín,

Oisín, son of Fionn, who spurned Heaven

without the faithful companionship of his hound!

A strain of fiddle music in Leitrim depressed me.

Badger blood glistened on a moonlit road.

A banshee in Aughrim,

at the door of a heritage centre,

combed my locks gently:

‘Dear, dear, where did you end up?’

I whooped from a cliff in Connemara.

Not even a seal answered.

A clam dropped by a seagull

down on top of my head

drove me clean mad for a week

so that I went searching for Cnú Direoil,

the lovely dwarf that Fionn owned,

all four fistfuls of him!

But he’s just about dust now,

no more than the tiny bride they found for him:

Blánaid, forgotten by her own.

Bizarre, isn’t it, this hound-language

that the hounds themselves can’t follow!

Follow they could … but they don’t want to hear.

From now on I’ll walk arseways

and out through my own tail

to where I’ll find Cnú,

his heart as big as himself is small,

charming whole worlds to sleep

with airy trick-o’-the looping fingers.

Gabriel Rosenstock

(Translated from the Irish by Paddy Bushe)

* the grey heron

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Mustanbih