Lunch with Pancho Villa

By Paul Muldoon

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.

Copyright Credit: Paul Muldoon, "Lunch with Pancho Villa" from Poems:1968-1998. Copyright © 2001 by Paul Muldoon. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Source: Poems: 1968-1998 (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2001)