Mister Toebones by Brooks Haxton (romance book recommendations .txt) 📕

my friend in vinyl platform pumps

with six-inch heels reached after me.

She took me by the hand, and led me home.

According to a book my father gave me,

nookie names a woman’s tender part

or person with “a kind of baby talk…

almost polite,” and in more recent use

it names the love between two men,

the tenderness that follows after a kiss,

a touch, a nibble in the kitchen while we cook,

an act which state laws meltingly approve.

As did my father, and as Jesus must have done

at supper, when he took John to his bosom.

Also John, who wrote this. And the John

who said in First John, “God is

love.” And Wild John, I would guess,

who ate his locusts dipped in honey

and felt glad to hear the Bridegroom’s voice.

But as for the John who said that locusts

sting like scorpions, so that the men stung

writhe in pain for days until they seek

the balm of death, though death flees,

and the men for five months pine away,

they fall in their bewilderment,

and in the dust they see the stinging

locusts with thoraxes like torsos

of blood horses dressed for battle,

and with gold crowns on their heads,

their faces like men’s faces,

but with women’s hair, and teeth

the teeth of lions: John, alone on Patmos,

saw this: he was pining for God’s love.

To the Moon

After I thumbed a ride I saw you

in the passenger window, more

than a crescent, almost half.

It was getting dark, and a voice

on the car radio was reporting

that Neil Armstrong had stepped

onto the Sea of Tranquility.

He was walking there in the dust.

Five times more, men visited,

two at a time. Some of them

lowered Moon buggies out of a bay

in the side of the lander. These

they unfolded and took for a spin.

Flower children of my generation

thought that the men were middle-aged,

and they were, but they were children too.

They left Moon buggies in your lap.

I wanted to tell you last year,

when I saw you in the bare limbs

at your narrowest crescent

next to the Morning Star,

and just this fall when you were large

and bright as I had ever seen:

to consider you in the night sky is

to release the mind more deeply into itself.

If Earth is alive, you were alive

when these men lived on you.

When they left you died,

and they plunged living into the sea.

Transit of Venus, 1882

Known for unruly auburn hair

and a dark look and the moody

talk only his sister took to heart,

he felt urgency was a virtue.

But when he proposed to his sister’s friend,

she wanted him to join the church,

and after he settled into the practice of law,

finally, when she said I do, what he wanted

on their wedding night went nowhere.

*

A junco nesting just outside flew

at her own reflection, skull first

thumping into the glass,

over and over every day.

The lady of the house made plans

for a luncheon and for whist.

The counselor walked for miles

in the woods around the lake.

She had not wanted him,

she did not, and she never would.

*

More and more in the face of his wife

at fifty, entertaining guests,

he saw the smile of her father

the barkeep, dead from drink.

A young astronomer told their friends

scattering light waves in thin air

tinted the clear sky blue.

*

The counselor’s son at twenty

taught the astronomer’s wife a step

they called the Hesitation Waltz. He let it be

known he found her irresistible as a flirt,

and dance lessons ended in a parting of ways.

*

But the counselor, who was her father’s age,

kept taking her on carriage rides in the country.

He brought her to play and sing for his sisters,

the way she learned at the Conservatory in Boston.

The sisters, both of them single, pitied him

in his marriage, and after she sang they let him know

they approved…though one of them

listened only from her room upstairs.

The following day he spoke as he said he must,

pausing outside the gate, and he saw, when he spoke,

she hesitated before she looked away.

*

Within a month her husband had left

on an expedition to California

where he wrote in his diary

about the transit of Venus photographed

from an observatory on the Pacific,

“We saw things as plain as was ever seen

with any glass in the world.”

His wife, meanwhile, explored

the December woods near home

in the company of the older man.

*

Within a year the counselor’s youngest,

eight years old, contracted a fever. This

was the boy who had returned his father’s

affection always, often it seemed

when there was no one else.

*

Having buried his son, he lay in bed

with malaria for a week, shivering, sweating,

begging forgiveness from the dead.

When he appeared again in public

he wore the wig he had worn for years,

with the unruly auburn hair of his youth,

but under the pallor of illness and age

in his face there was a wound past healing.

*

The astronomer and his wife

decided together, it was time:

she took the older man as her lover

now in the elegant dining room

of the house where he was born,

his wife asleep in the house next door,

the sisters quiet in their beds upstairs.

*

For years to come, after observing the stars,

the husband home at daybreak

would whistle a tune from a comic opera

to let the lovers know he had arrived.

*

The astronomer’s wife had forgiven him

his affairs, not that he would ever change

or repent. But he came home. He built

a fire. He laid out pillows by the hearth.

He led her there, and knelt,

and spoke while he undressed her.

*

At first, to relieve the uneasiness in her mind

she needed devotion from her husband.

And later, more, from her lover. She needed

to search the tenderness in their hands,

their mouths, the urgency in the face of one,

and then of the other, often that same day.

The two men, meanwhile, had become good friends.

*

Because the dance lessons ended in a parting of ways,

the eldest reported everything to his mother.

It was a secret everyone everywhere knew.

Her sisters-in-law had known

in advance. The congregation

knew, faculty, faculty wives.

Her neighbors’ servants knew.

Shopkeepers. Judges. Deans.

*

In the year of mourning for their son

endless arguments led nowhere.

He was a man of the law. Pleading,

with him, was even more useless than tears.

When she suggested renovating the house,

and he objected to the expense, she wheeled

to rip at the wallpaper with her hands.

When she threw a kitchen knife

at his heart, what