he wrote love letters she believed immortal.
My gate to God, she called him, and my King.
*
The astronomer after the death of his friend
groped his daughter’s college classmates.
Having been among the first to see
the Martian moons, in his sixties
he was asked to retire, suffering by then
from violent fits of madness.
These persisted after the death
of his wife into extreme old age.
His scientific project in his decline
was a formula for eternal youth.
*
A painter of exotic birds and flowers
took the astronomer’s wife
as his pupil when she was young.
She painted for the reclusive sister
the Indian pipe in bloom.
The sister said in her thank-you note,
though some called this the ghost
plant, it had always been for her
“the preferred flower of life.”
They found in the upstairs room
hundreds of original poems. These
the younger woman worked for years
to edit and publish in three books,
embossed in gold on the cover of each
an image of the Indian pipe.
Qoheleth
I used to think the Preacher meant by vanity
the sin of pride, but it was emptiness.
He said, Emptiness of emptinesses.
All is emptiness. Third from the last verse
of his little book is a note to himself and us:
“Of making many books there is no end.”
Where But to Think Is to Be Full of Sorrow
In the Bardo of Becoming, reequipped with all five senses after death, the soul must struggle to accept a vision of its future life.
If I came back a mollusk, I believe
that slipping my briny clamhood whole
over the tongue of the one I love
for her to savor my living flesh would be
delicious, even without the brain to tell myself
how she might feel. I doubt, meanwhile, that having
a beak in the folds of my crotch, a scrotum
arms arrayed with suction cups for clinging
will arouse even the loneliest snorkler at the reef.
Still, I would rather yearn, and be an octopus,
than die more happily inside her as a clam.
Just to change my color from bruised plum
to peach and in a second jonquil streaked
with oxblood and sky blue, to my mind, looks
voluptuous—to his…is his a mind?…who knows?
He can see, experts say, quite well, two
optic fields at once, though not in color,
polarized. He sees, beyond the brain’s ability
to prompt or follow, movements of his own
arms imitating body language from more deadly
species such as lionfish and snakes.
When I pretended to know a book
I had not read, I watched myself like that:
the way a prowler on a starlit reef
might watch his arms taste what they touch
without the brain’s consent. We like to think,
as homo sapiens, we choose, and then
we choose in fear to live half numb, half stunned,
not like the octopus in an unlighted
lab at night who eyes fish in the tank
across from his and, though wellfed, conducts
a foray: he slips out under the tank lid,
crawls the length of the counter, climbs sheer glass
into the other tank, consumes the fish,
and crosses home before the lab attendant
comes to work that morning. He can also learn,
they say, to thread a maze, distinguish
geometric shapes, and twist the snug lid
from a jar of crabmeat. I believe, in my next
life, when I unfurl my body out of a seam
between enormous lobes of coral
where I have hidden from a moray eel,
when I jet myself, arms trailing, straight up
into the Moon that floats over the calm
face of the ocean, when my arms have spread
their webbing so that I drift umbrella-like
to mimic the man-o’-war, while streams
of copper-rich, blue blood, cool as the night sea,
course through my three hearts, my mollusk brains
will feel more keenly their relation to the world
than any brainless mussel ever felt
to think we choose, and then we choose to harm
ourselves and bring pain to the ones we say
we love. My next life may be brief. Male octopus
and female couple once and die. The male caressingly
plants sperm under the mantle of his mate,
who kills and eats him if she finds the woo subpar.
If he does well, however, he will himself
release from optic glands like our pituitaries
hormones which at other times spur puberty
or hunger, and now bring about swift aging
to the point of death. The female, meanwhile,
with the male’s third right arm broken off inside her,
seeks the lair where she can tend her eggs
while fasting for some weeks until they hatch
and she too dies. With luck my soul, inside
the just-hatched larval mollusk of my choice,
will drift for days among great clouds of plankton,
much as the octopus from my last sushi now drifts,
vagrant somewhere in the salt depth of this thought.
Fig Preserves
Two women while they talk peel figs.
To keep them whole, with stems and underskins
intact, they soak in limewater, and slow-cook
in spiced syrup until clear. Jars of these
with curls of cinnamon and lemon wheels
in amber, anyone can see, are works of art—
each fig a work of art. One woman tells
wild stories from her past, which the other cannot
understand as art or even as a gift, but takes
to be raw life. I liked my figs raw as a boy.
I liked tearing them apart just picked.
The storyteller in the scene above is poor
and black, or colored, as she puts it,
and the listener is rich and white. The rich one
staggers into grief and guilt. A tumor grows
inside the poor one’s brain. And neither asks
for help. And both provide. My mother,
having lived this, wrote the scene in her last novel
so that to understand it, as the prophet said,
is to believe. My mother gropes
at eighty-nine for words to tell me
how her father hung their tree with pots
and pans, and from the porch late afternoons
and Sundays, when he saw the birds
he would set things clanging with a yank
on the bell cord tied to a limb. He kept watch
every year, to save figs for d
essert and canning.
When my mother tries to talk, some days,
the words are ripe and easy on the stem,
the way they were when she wrote stories,
back when I would help pick figs,
and she would let me eat more than I picked.
NOTES
“The Other World”—The site of one of the earliest known chariot burials is in Russia near Kazakhstan, not far from Krivoye Ozero, or Crooked Lake.
“After the Snow Squall”—When earthlight suffuses the darkened area inside the crescent of a new moon, the new moon has the old moon in her arm.
“We Could Say Οὐρανός”—Uranus (OOR-ah-noos in Latin) is visible to the naked eye, but is so faint and moves so slowly that it was not known to be a planet until the eighteenth century.
“Observations from a Hillside Stairway on the Day of Atonement, Just Before My Wife and Daughters Break Their Fast”—Rags, in poker lingo, are cards of no particular value. James Erwin was a nineteenth-century circuit rider from northern New York State. His father, a Presbyterian minister, disapproved when James as a boy began to preach the more liberal tenets of Methodism.
“The Nationality of Neptune”—William Herschel discovered that the faintest planet visible to the naked eye was a planet. He named it after the English king. A Swede called it Neptune. A German called it Uranus, and said that its orbit was affected by another planet, sighted later on the strength of calculations made by a Frenchman. The Frenchman wanted to name the more distant planet after himself, but he had been calling it Neptune before the sighting. This time Neptune stuck.
“The Arctic Vortex on Snooks Pond, 2014”—A winter that is cooler than usual in parts of the United States may be warmer than usual in the Northern Hemisphere as a whole. For the planet, 2014 was the warmest year since 1850 when detailed record keeping began. The next five years were the warmest ever recorded and July 2019 was the warmest month. Almost everyone who has studied climate science attributes the rise in planetary temperature to carbon emission from human activities.
“Apologies to the Dead”—The word apology here means advocacy to an unreceptive audience, as in the Apology of Socrates. Children with precocious ovulation have given birth as early as the age of five. According to family records, Mary Howard at the age of eight gave birth to her first son, whose father was then twenty-five.
“Near Saturn”—The largest of Saturn’s moons, Titan, is the one moon in our solar system with an atmosphere. At the temperatures and pressures under Titan’s crust, water mixed with ammonia may be liquid, but at the surface water is ice. Lakes of ethane and methane there are the only bodies of surface liquid known to exist apart from those on Earth. A benzene snowflake may fall into an ethane lake and sink intact. In the rings of Saturn moonlets are detectable as propeller-shaped windows of darkness. Astrophysicists call the sources of discrepancies in our best equations dark matter and dark energy. According to their best hypothesis, these mysterious presences make up about 95 percent of the universe.
“Lingerie Femme and the Vagaries of Pronunciation”—My father liked reference books and provocative assertions. The diatribe in this poem appeals to me most when I hear it in his voice.
“A Voter from Mississippi Considers the State Constitution”—The opening phrase of this poem alludes to the love described as the greatest virtue in 1 Corinthians 13. Most state constitutions make mental competence prerequisite for voting. Some states deny “idiots and insane persons” the right to vote. Legal definitions for these terms, also used in immigration law, have been disputed.
“A Cat Lover’s Guide to The Bell Curve”—Apart from conditions where people raise them for slaughter, pigs are protective of their young and clean in their habits, with an intelligence about equal to that of dogs. Cats regard pigs and dogs as inferior.
“From Anyte of Tegea”—This translation is dedicated to my friends Samuel Gruber and his late wife, Judith Meighan. Details about the spear have been added, since it is no longer reasonable to assume a reader’s familiarity with such things. Proper names from the Greek have been omitted.
“Bananas”—In some photographs the golden langur looks like Henrik Ibsen. This impression, and other details in some of these poems, may not be strictly factual.
“The Moons of Jupiter”—Patsy Cline died on March 5, 1963. Richard Kenneth Haxton Sr. died on March 5, 1970. When Voyager I made its closest approach to Jupiter on March 5, 1979, it photographed two previously undetected Jovian moons.
“Don’t Get Me Wrong”—To label villages targeted for bombing as “concentrations of the enemy aggressor” and then to refer to hundreds of thousands of civilians killed as “collateral damage” is microaggression in one of the more recent senses of the term. Starbuck’s poem “Of Late” addresses that misrepresentation.
“The Bewilderment”—According to current scholarship on the Johns associated with scripture, the baptist, the disciple, the evangelist, the epistolist, and the revelator seem to be five different people. In one version of the story of Eden, Lilith, the first woman, created equal to Adam, leaves the Garden when he insists that she lie under him during intercourse, not on top. Commander Peppitt’s note on the use of the word nookie among men in the Royal Navy is in Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang. John the Baptist appears in a leather girdle eating locusts and wild honey in Matthew 3:4. The description of locusts with stingers and human faces comes from Revelation 9:7.
“Transit of Venus, 1882”—The writings of Emily Dickinson might have remained unknown if not for the dedication of her brother Austin’s lover, Mabel Loomis Todd, who worked for years after the poet’s death editing the poems and securing their first publication. Her work helped the poems find an audience in the seven decades before the original language was restored. Mabel Loomis Todd was also an accomplished musician, artist, writer, and conservation activist.
“Where But to Think Is to Be Full of Sorrow”—In this poem a man about to be reincarnated prefers the more active intelligence of an octopus to the mentality of other mollusks, such as mussels and clams. The author, on the other hand, feels drawn toward flickerings of consciousness at the subatomic and super galactic levels.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to the editors of the following magazines for publishing poems from this collection: Agni (“Catullus, Carmen III,” “Catullus, Carmen VIII,” “From Anyte of Tegea”); The Atlantic (“The Other World”); Corresponding Voices (“Love and Empire,” “Message, 1944” [under the title “Information, 1944”], “The Cormorant at Snooks Pond,” “Qoheleth,” “Unlit Kitchen, 5 A.M.”); The Georgia Review (“Olm,” “Where But to Think Is to Be Full of Sorrow”); Michigan Quarterly Review (“Oceanic,” “To the Water Bear”); New England Review at Breadloaf website (“Mister Toebones,” “Tracks Everywhere at Noon”); The Paris Review (“A Cat Lover’s Guide to The Bell Curve”); Ploughshares (“The Arctic Vortex at Snooks Pond, 2014”); The Progressive (“Don’t Get Me Wrong”); Smartish Pace (“The Featherbed”); Southern Humanities Review (“A Voter from Mississippi Considers the State Constitution”); Virginia Quarterly Review (“Observations from a Hillside Stairway on the Day of Atonement, Just Before My Wife and Daughters Break Their Fast,” “Bananas,” “The Journal of Dr. Beaurieux”); Waxwing (“To Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham,” “Copernicus”); and The Yale Review (“Lingerie Femme and the Vagaries of Pronunciation”).
Thanks to Deborah Garrison, whose editing of four collections of my poems has been the most constant support of my life in publishing. Todd Portnowitz has been a crucial help in bringing out this book. My wife Francie and our three children have given me the only world where these poems could have come to be.
A Note About the Author
Brooks Haxton has published nine books of poetry, a nonfiction account of his son’s career in high-stakes poker, and translations from
Greek, French, and German. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere, and his nonfiction has been featured in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. He wrote the script for a film on the life and work of Tennessee Williams, broadcast in the American Masters series. A recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and others, Haxton has taught for many years in the graduate creative writing programs of Syracuse University and Warren Wilson College.
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