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

her grave nearby

in Minnesota where we lived,

in the state of water mirroring the sky.

But first, Hasan, because of you,

a thousand threads of light

inside the darkness of a little box

preserved this image of her face.

After the Snow Squall

When the crescent

hung in the clear

with Mars and Venus

over the frozen lake,

the dean

in the parking lot

could see

that the darker region

shone from a shimmer

of noon waves

on the Pacific,

so that the lunar lakes

and seas appeared

as brightly Earth-lit

as she had ever seen them,

and she wondered

how she would look

from there,

from the Marsh of Decay

at lunar midnight,

here on the just-past-full

Earth where the edge

had been shaven

into the darkness.

Olm

Proteus anguinus

Salamanders used to live in fire,

but these live underwater, underground,

in bone-cold darkness without air, some of them

for more than a hundred years. They look like snakes

with feet and human skin, the pale snake’s head

without a face, inane, all baby pink

and slippery: no eyes that you can see,

no ears, no nose, no mouth, or almost none…

gills at the neck, branching on either side,

blood red, like lungs turned inside out. The first

Slovenians who saw these wriggling, flushed

into the light by heavy rains, considered them

human fish. Such human fish, they reasoned,

with such winglike gills, they must have been

the spawn of dragons. Near the olm the earliest

vampire lived, a peasant by the name of Jure

Grando, Big George. He rose from the grave

at night to find his widow, whom he raped

while smiling, she said, from the effort

to draw breath. The neighbors wanted to drive

a stake into his heart, and they tried hawthorn,

which is a hard wood from an enchanted tree

blossoming at the mouth of the cave

into the other world, but hawthorn would not

pierce Big George’s heart. The village priest

reminded the corpse, where it lay smiling still

after they dug it up, that Jesus did not suffer

on the cross to make that ghoulish smile

complacent, and a man named Stipan (Steve)

stepped forward, saw in hand. He sawed off

George’s head while everybody watched the coffin

fill with blood. The first book to describe this

was the first to describe the olm as well,

The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola, Nuremberg,

1689. When prey is scarce, the olm chillaxes

sometimes, motionless for ten years, to wait.

His heftier cousin in the subterranean lakes

of Central Mexico is called the water monster,

or axolotl…monster, here, in the older sense

of cosmic omen, a creature which the indigenous

people find, though near extinction, tasty.

Early in the Christian Empire

Constantine had his first son, commander

of fleets and legions, heir presumptive,

put to death by hanging. Also the empress,

not much older than her stepson, he had

choked by steam in an overheated bath.

This Constantine deemed merciful.

His sons by her he placed years later,

all three, on imperial thrones. Soon

they murdered their most eminent kin.

In a few years the eldest brother fell

in a war to kill the youngest. Then, the death

of the youngest, dragged from hiding

in a church by men supposedly his own

and butchered, left only the one most feared.

Half his army died in the deadliest battle

ever fought by Rome, while he hid nearby:

Church historians have him rapt in prayer.

On his deathbed in a fever, having murdered

the next-to-last of his cousins, he saw,

finally, he was to be succeeded by the last.

The Featherbed

in the presidential suite

was the wettest we’ve ever seen

from the standpoint of pee.

Copernicus

After he took his priestly vow, my uncle proposed,

they say, to the rector’s daughter. She bore his son,

in any case, and married another man. Later

my uncle had me take my vow. Men of the cloth

elected him Prince-Bishop. His son was mayor.

I was a canon for life, and his physician. In my study

at the episcopal palace I translated from Greek

a book of poems in praise of moral truth,

and of the prostitutes and beauties of Byzantium.

I dedicated these to him. At forty I moved

from the palace into the tower of a cathedral

in a fishing village. There, observing the heavens

when I could, I managed coin and property for the state.

My housekeeper when I was old was banished

by my onetime friend, the new Prince-Bishop,

who alleged that she was more to me than I would say.

Devotion, meanwhile, to the loving mind of God

made unacceptable the nest of calibrated rings

with Earth at the center and a tiny Sun in orbit.

This, the science of a thousand years, I took

in hand, to measure by its rule my thought,

to set aside the old, ungainly universe, and leave

God’s body true to its own motion naked.

We Could Say Oỷρανóς

Whoever thinks that urinous

has canceled the pun in your anus

needs a clue: with oo from clue

and awss from sauce we could

say oor-a-NAWSS. Homer

said that, and he did not need to see

to call a god by name. Those

who could see Ouranos back then

saw only a speck. Nobody knew

the speck was a planet. Nobody

knew what planets were.

Ouranos was a blue-green orb

spun backwards on its side

with an aurora at its belt and moons

and rings and a magnetic field

warped every which way. Winds blow

stronger there than storms that upend

double-wides in Kansas. Once in a while

a meteor big as I am, older maybe

than the Moon, sails into a wind

like that, and burns, and flashes,

oblivious, under a cloud of ice.

Sea Cave

Beyond the mouth of a stairwell

they may find under the sweep

of their dive lights blue crab

and American lobster, swimming

sideways, swimming backwards,

walking the platform where I walked

among the millions brought and left

and carried away aboard the IRT.

Catullus, Carmen III

Mourn, O gods of love and mortal lovers.

Mourn. My girlfriend’s sparrow, apple

of her eye, is dead, the one she dandled

in her lap, and let hop here and there

with little chirps of joy, sweet thing—now

gone that dark way none comes home.

For this I curse you, dark one, swallower

of beauty: for the dark deed which has made

my girl’s eyes red with weeping.

Catullus, Carmen VIII

Enough, Catullus! No more pleading!

What you thought