"Stew or soup and being chats"
A Illuminated Interpretation.
(To Paul Muldoon)

Being the two of us (Sister Candice and Sister Erminia)
(fervent, not so fervent, we haven't decided it yet) Catholics
we adored this image of the waiter-priest
getting ready to dispend the Holy Wafer of Communion.(with fork, spoon,
nap)
Paul Muldoon is such a mundane priest!
Nothing outside the Self (his
Self),
no authority, either
religious or civic, is worth his reverence.

Blim Blom Blam (chorus)...

This is one poet who invariably
 speaks from an ambivalent position (linguistic, emotional, or
 otherwise), which most critics attribute to his having grown up on
 the North/South border of Ireland, and if there's a lot more to it
 than that glib explanation (as we suspect there is), it is probably
 fair to say that most, if not all, Muldoon poems are a commission
 from the Boundary Commission in one way or another.
Indeed, the absence of a double meaning here is made impossible by the
fact
that there might be a double meaning for me - in my exercise of the
reader's
authority - which goes beyond dearest Muldoon's  faculty of control.

We too see a double meaning in the soup and stew.
The first is the stew of the holy  testicles of the
Taurus with brazen feet tamed by Jason.
His relationship with his parents, the original
 pair he interrupted as the third term, would seem to be one nexus
 for his consistent ambivalence, going by what's enacted in "Milkweed
and Monarch," where he kneels at the graves of his mother and father
 in a poem whose recurring line is "could barely tell one from the
other." In an earlier poem, "The Mixed Marriage," he refers to his
 schoolmarm mother's "world of Castor and Pollux"--twin students in
her classroom whom "she could never tell" apart. And then there's
Muldoon's own childhood classmate, Lefty Clery, who appeared twice
in their class photograph when he took advantage of that period's
slow photography to dash from one end of the posed group to the
other with perfect timing. But let consider for a moment the complexity
of the substances involved in the sacred meal.
Whatever he's (the poet)
eating, though, must be swabable with bread, which, like the wine
he "drains" is required in this poem for his subsequent dumbshow
"Mass"--the part of it that occurs post-Communion (according with
the lovers already post-we/us state), when the priest (with an altar
cloth folded over one forearm--just like a waiter, we always thought
as children he  must finish the leftover wine and wafers before putting
the Host-containing Chalice back in the little Tabernacle that sits
on the altar--and genuflecting, or bowing, to it. The same act of
Transubstantiation that renders the Communion wafers and wine into
the body and blood of Christ elevates the priest to Christness as
he administers the sacrament of Communion to those at Mass and then
partakes himself of the corporeal remainder.

When the Host/Christ is
returned to the Tabernacle, the priest reverts to his own identity,
just as the waiter, briefly elevated to the diner's role, then bows
 and smiles in his own servile capacity to his "absence" as the diner
whose bread and wine he both served and consumed.

The soup in the poem, evoking the soup in the sacred Chalice
 is that prepared by Muldoon's auntie from America,
sent by E-mail to him and his girl friend in occasion of their 13
anniversary of marriage to poetry, and which, because of the distance,
arrived slightly cooled down, and was  therefore, unpleasant, carrying
with
it all  the logical pessimistic connotations of a balance,  which
metaphorically represents the fatal future unavoidable loss of passion
(the
cooling down of the soup temperature),  between two cultural and
pre-cultural times and spaces, two bodies and tow minds.Whoever the
 speaker's fellow diner may be (and we take Saint Peter's point about his/
her nonspecificity while still reading the pair as romantic due to
its fit with the Passion, which begins in Gethsemane after Supper
on Holy Thursday), they form a pair together (if not for long, we
gather) relative to the waiter, whose remoteness from them is
signaled by "a waiter" (i.e., he's not even THEIR waiter) and
reinforced by his coming out of the kitchen with "stew or soup"
(they can't tell from where they're sitting) and then seating
himself at "the next table but one" from theirs.

It seems to me that the same thing is going on in "Holy Thursday"
with the numbers and the associated ambivalent position of the
speaker, who constitutes one leg of the (trinitarian) triangle,
sacred and profane, on which the poem is structured.
 Hence, it is
possible to reconsider by means of analyzing the couple "soup/stew" the
author's intention to reconsider the mythic and ritual domestic and
communal
dynamics, from the point of view of salvation.

co-coordinately yours , Sister Erminia and Sister Candice (Carmelitane
scalze)






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