Two Workmen were carrying a sheet of asbestos
down the main street of Dingle;
it must have been nailed, at a slight angle,
to the same-sized gap between Brandon
and whichever’s the next mountain.
Nine o’clock. We watched the village dogs
take turns to spritz the hotel’s refuse-sacks.
I remembered Tralee’s unbiodegradable flags
from the time of the hunger-strikes.
We drove all day past mounds of sugar-beet,
hay-stacks, silage-pits, building-sites,
a thatched cottage even-
all of them draped in black polythene
and weighted against the north-east wind
by concrete blocks, old tyres; bags of sand
at a makeshift army post
across the border. By the time we got to Belfast
the whole of Ireland would be under wraps
like, as I said, ‘one of your man’s landscapes’.
‘Your man’s? You don’t mean Christo’s?’
(Paul Muldoon)
More Poetry from Paul Muldoon:
Paul Muldoon Poems based on Topics: Time- Milkweed and Monarch (Paul Muldoon Poems)
- Gathering Mushrooms (Paul Muldoon Poems)
- Extraordinary Rendition (Paul Muldoon Poems)
- A Dent (Paul Muldoon Poems)
- Hedgehog (Paul Muldoon Poems)
- The Frog (Paul Muldoon Poems)
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Based on Topics: Time PoemsBased on Keywords: ireland, wraps, draped, mounds, landscapes, whichever, thatched, north-east, dingle, weighted, workmen