Daddy-O

by Paul Muldoon

To think you lived ten years without a wife
to frown on your dancing that newfangled jitterbug
or taking a penknife
to an ounce of walnut plug

or a scuffle hoe, bejapers, to scutch.
To think you lived ten years without a wife
and a wife’s touch
whilst holding your hands to the fire as if fending off

a future in which scutch would indeed be rife
in your twin–bedded crypt.
To think you lived ten years without a wife
who’d by now outstripped

you in dying as in whatever–it’s–called.
Losing ground since she had to scutch and
loosestrife,
she might have been all the more galled
to think you lived ten years, bejapers, without a wife.