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

surprised her

least was her revulsion,

seeing him walk away.

*

Her well-known evenings now

became a travesty for gawkers.

She, the unloved wife, must

drunkenly play herself.

*

For years, even on days he planned

to spend the night in his neighbor’s arms,

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

for a head, warts, bulging eyes, and snakelike

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

while fattening on a farmer’s rope. We like

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

and squirrels come back for figs, how

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 dessert and canning.

When my