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

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