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

went wrong went

wrong. When days were sunnier,

and when a girl was willing, you made love.

You loved her, let’s just say, as none

may evermore be loved. You gave her

all you had. She laughed, and what she gave

you took, and it was brilliant. Now,

when she wants nothing more, your

pleading least of all, stand firm. Say:

Goodbye, girl. Catullus is unmoved.

He does not care now what you do.

If no one cares, it serves you right,

you bitch! Now see who finds your teasing

sweet, who begs for it, who praises it,

who kisses you, who whispers you

your name…And whose lips are you biting?

Not mine. No: Catullus is unmoved.

Essential Tremor

for Daniel Moriarty

The black and gold stitch

from the upper gill of a brook trout

to the middle ray of the tail fin,

you once told me, houses hair cells

sensitive to the flow of the stream.

And the rest…that dark green

swath on the flank,

the spots of ocher, stipples

blood red ringed with cornflower blue…

the whole thing shimmering

with the most delicate scales,

to the fisherman’s eye

is a revelation. You too,

after you led me down at dusk

into a stream so cold

it made my ankles hurt,

and after we caught one each,

just big enough to keep

and cook on a little fire we made

at the foot of the mountain

under the Dog Day stars, you too,

when you smiled, freckles by firelight

trembling on the back of your hand.

To Josephine Chamberlain Ayres Haxton

From the end of the gravel road

we walked down into the woods

to look for a swimming hole in the creek.

You kept scanning the ground for trilliums

you said you wanted to plant

on the way to the house

where your father spent his childhood.

In the gulley we saw handprints

of opossums, and the pad marks from raccoon

and fox and rabbit, scribbled over

with mouse and bird tracks.

There were chanterelles at the foot of a beech trunk,

and in the cleft of a root a copperhead

rearing to strike, bands on her back

almost as orange as the mushrooms.

She came sidewinding straight at you, rattling

her tail in the fallen beech leaves, belly

big with eggs about to hatch inside her.

If I had written you this when you could read,

you might have reminded me that your friend

Bert came on our walk to the creek. I loved Bert.

She was delighted, as usual, by the woods and you.

It was a good day, though we found no swimming hole

or trilliums. None of us got bitten by the snake.

The creek lay sunlit in the deep woods,

brilliant, rippling over the sand and gravel,

with clear pools here and there to the knee,

where crawdads swam with little bream and catfish.

Under the Searchlight of a Robot Sub

Where the whale lay

on the floor of the canyon

hagfish came to feed in the dark

with shrimp and crab and sea pig.

Boneworms sent roots

into the whale oil

at the core of the bone.

Plumes grew,

microscopic mates inside them

shedding sperm over the eggs

which drifted nowhere

by ten thousands, settling,

some of them, onto another

whale fall miles away.

Inside a ship

with decks lit by the sun,

in the dim light

of a control room,

human brains in bone casements,

male and female, watched

the plumes pink

in the glow of their screens.

They watched—excitedly

scuttling over the keyboards,

tipping the joysticks,

with their delicate,

pink-palmed, flexible hands.

The Loving Essence of the Duckmole

Ornithorhynchus anatinus, a.k.a. tambreet, mallagong, & boonaburra

The jimmialong, tail plump with fat,

electrosensors tingling in his bill,

the swivel in his hips more like

the bearded dragon’s than like mine,

his four-tipped penis at the ready,

is not cute. He is himself. In courtship

having dug two tunnels, his and hers,

which she can close to lay and tend

their clutch of leathery, soft eggs,

by night he swims and sweeps

his bill where muck sparks everywhere

with insect larvae, worms, and crayfish

which the local crayfishers call yabbies.

A puppy-like, warm-blooded

duck-in-a-fur-coat seems, much

as Ronald Reagan’s smile, or Bundy’s

good-boy grooming, to suggest

what looks innocuous will do no harm.

But in the mating season he secretes from glands

in his hindquarters into the hollow spurs of bone

at either ankle venom so refined that

when a fisherman, let’s not say poacher,

tries removing him from a net,

the stab of pain into the man’s wrist

bathes him to the shoulder all at once

in fire. The burning arm throbs

everywhere. It swells. The man

in a delirium of pain falls vomiting.

For three days, arm twice normal size,

he writhes, and morphine does not quell

the pain. People stung may think themselves

the ones attacked, although the platypus

in the encounter often dies, the person never.

Observations from a Hillside Stairway on the Day of Atonement, Just Before My Wife and Daughters Break Their Fast

Under the hanging lights in a pool hall

at nineteen I read the table after the break

and followed a map in my head

to take beer money from older men

while, eight thousand miles under my feet,

boys I knew from high school,

some of them, learned to pray.

Now, at a table in Vegas,

holding maybe a rag and an ace,

my son is reading a voice, a glance,

and running probabilities

in his head. Sons of other men

are bivouacked at dawn in a desert

where Abraham’s father worshipped

Babylonian gods. Everything wobbles

and spins. Here, in the little woods

a block from Erwin Methodist Church,

bottles drunken boys have shattered

over the brick steps flash

in wobbling streaks of sunlight.

Two hundred years ago, James Erwin

at the end of boyhood left his father’s house,

and walked into the local wilderness

to preach. Wolves appeared at dusk,

and the boy with a Bible sang.

He shouted God’s praise into the sky.

Here, the fox grapes hang from a guy wire

over the edge of the trees where a doe

and two fawns stand in poison ivy

to the hip. I never did learn

to pray or carry a tune, but I say

these words into my cupped palm

quietly, not to spook the deer.

Kropotkin and the Lake on Mars

Kropotkin worked by the flicker of a tiny oil lamp…During the short hours of the day he would transcribe his notes on a typewriter…Much of his leisure he spent at the piano.

—Emma Goldman, January 1921

Pyotr Kropotkin, scientist of anarchy,

once theorized that the weight of a glacier

must melt ice underneath it into