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

a lake.

Fifty years after Kropotkin died, radar

showed at Vostok Station in the Antarctic

under a glacier two miles thick

one of the largest lakes on Earth.

Now they have found a smaller

such lake under the ice on Mars,

water, saltier than the Dead Sea.

After forty years in exile, and a few

in prison, Kropotkin came home

to a cottage he shared with his wife.

There, in conscience, he wrote

that taking hostages for the revolution

was wrong. When company came, watched

by the secret police, he would play

transcriptions from the Italian opera

so that his musical friends could sing.

Thanks to the Makers of Shells

Factory workers before I was born

cut and fitted eighteen pieces of oak wood

to construct the chair at my desk

where I have seated myself,

as a hermit-crab-tail might slip into the vacant shell of a conch.

Here I let my mind walk sideways,

fingertips tapping the keyboard in my lap more feelingly

because each outer shell of a fingernail holds

the tingling pad alert

around its inner shell of bone.

My laptop closes on its hinge,

the way the operculum of a twisted necklace snail might

pull shut at the approach of the hermit crab,

the spool of words, like the snail, enveloped then

in the nacreousness in the dark.

Inside my skull another operculum covers

the insular lobe

where consciousness takes place, as if the mind

were a shell for the flesh, or flesh were a husk

for the cosmic one.

Message, 1944

In Budapest, after the cherry blossoms fell,

a colonel in the SS asked a leader

from the underground

to carry a message abroad: the SS

would release one million Jews

in exchange for ten thousand trucks

and a thousand tons of tea, coffee, cocoa,

and soap for soldiers on the Russian front.

“Blood for goods,” he called the exchange.

Then he inverted the phrase

for effect, “goods for blood.”

Almost no one herded onto the trains in Budapest

knew what the leaders of the resistance knew.

In June, on a typical day at Auschwitz, more

Jews died than soldiers in both armies fell

in Normandy on D-Day, which was the sixth.

On the seventh, British intelligence met

the Hungarian messenger’s train at Aleppo.

He was trying to help his people, they thought,

but the German offer had to be a trick.

From Aleppo the British took him

to Cairo where they questioned him

for four months. The diplomat

in charge of refugees asked,

“What shall I do with those million

Jews? Where shall I put them?”

The British thought the exchange

of blood for goods would be

collusion against their ally Russia.

Transports of prisoners might be

deployed as human shields for the enemy.

Confusion, involving the demand

for medicine, shelter, and food,

would prolong the end of the war

and undermine negotiations to follow.

Churchill declined the offer. Experts,

some of them, thought that the murder

of Jews, exaggerated in propaganda,

was already reaching an end.

From mid-May into mid-July,

in fact, the SS murdered four hundred

thousand more Hungarian Jews,

more than the total number of American

soldiers killed from the beginning

until the end of the war.

The messenger upon release

joined the resistance in Palestine,

and fought to overthrow British rule.

Later, secret police from Israel kidnapped

the German colonel near his house

in Argentina and brought him

to Jerusalem for trial. He pleaded

innocent. Found guilty, he was put

to death by hanging, this in a prison

near where eyeless scorpions

live in limestone caves.

The messenger believed at the end

of his life that the British assessment

of “blood for goods” was correct.

He regretted his part in the offer.

Blut gegen Ware, at any rate, still

describes the logic of money and war.

Unlit Kitchen, 5 A.M.

After the rain

an old man saw

through the spider web

on a fogged window

far down under the cedars

a cloud on the pond

lift into the daylight.

To Floyd, Louisiana

ca. 1807–ca. 1918

In the Second Great Awakening

Moses Floyd, a Methodist preacher,

came from Pennsylvania

to the swamp, and a few years later

here you were, a town with a dry goods store,

a church, a courthouse, and saloons.

Young men staggered into the dusty street

where guns were a kind of law,

like the hanging tree, and the documents

stating who owned what and whom.

But the steamboats quit their run

on the bayou, and the railroad

and the highway left you, church

and courthouse, store, saloons, and all,

abandoned. Buildings downtown

disappeared. Now there’s only a crook

in the two-lane through the level

corn and cotton fields slowly

giving up your name to oblivion,

like the forgotten name of the mounds

nearby on Bayou Macon, where the people

who gathered hickory nuts, persimmons,

scuppernongs, and mayhaws, cast

their weighted nets for catfish, cooked

in covered pits, using ceramic stones

to set the heat. One of them carved

a bannerstone in the shape of wings,

another made a throwing stick for a spear,

and all of them died three thousand years ago.

A few days’ walk southwest

is another circle of mounds, these

from before the reign of Gilgamesh.

The people who built them

fished for the drum which Frenchmen

taught me as a boy to call the gaspergou.

Near there, Floyd, when you were young,

children huddled among their elders

on a steamboat called the Cleopatra.

On a river through deep woods

sheathed in ice they were passing

into another world, taken by strangers

out of the only world they knew

in a kind of boat that trembled

with a guttural moan. And near you,

Floyd, under trees far larger

than any alive now in that region,

another party of Choctaw came on foot,

young men, old men, women, and children

following lost guides in the swamp where limbs

snapped under the weight of ice and toppled.

Sunset, Mare Spumans

The dust on the floor

of the Foaming Sea

is barren in all directions.

One last spark at the uppermost

limb of the Sun blinks out

into a seemingly

infinite swarm of stars,

and the dust cools

in the next Earth day

from the boiling point

of water down to the freezing

point of gasoline.

From the Journal of Dr. Beaurieux

Witness to an execution by guillotine, June 28, 1905

After the blade dropped, and the eyelids twitched,

the spasms tugging at the lips went calm,

and when I called out to the head, “Languille!”

the eyelids lifted up, this time, I swear,

in a distinctly normal movement, slow,

as if awakening, or torn from thought.

With pupils focusing themselves, the eyes

looked sharp, not like a dying man’s, not vague,

and when the lids went shut, I called again,

“Languille!” and again, without a