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

twitch,

they lifted, and the eyes looked into mine.

To the Water Bear

Kleiner Wasserbär, observed by Pastor Johann Goeze, Quedlinburg, December 10, 1772

Jesus in his little boat said to the crowd

on the bank at Galilee

that the mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds,

is to the full-grown tree

as our mere inkling of the kingdom of heaven is

to the kingdom itself.

Maybe the mustard seed is not the smallest

of all seeds and does not really grow

into a tree. The point was not to measure

seeds, or where we go after we die. The point

was reckoning beyond measure.

You, of course, were small,

much smaller than the mustard seed.

Yet to the German pastor who first saw you

move as if in slow-mo underwater,

under the microscope, you looked

enormous, eight stout legs, he called them feet,

with claws like those of a brown bear:

water bear, he called you…little water bear.

Your mouth was something else,

a nozzle for a telescoping vacuum

set with teeth. It struck, and drew the prey

back onto the twin blades inside for the kill.

Gentlemen in those days used

the hunting rifle, which was the latest thing,

to slaughter every bear in every patch of woods

in their whole country, so that the first

brown bear at large in Germany

since Bismarck came of age was famous

just ten years ago. Bruno,

they called him. From the Italian Alps

he walked for weeks through Austria

into the borderland where Germans shot

their last wild bear in eighteen thirty-five.

He celebrated this return by killing

thirty sheep, assorted goats, chickens,

rabbits, and one little girl’s pet guinea pig,

which he finished chewing

on the front stoop of the Polizei.

Tourists at the local inns, grown fearful

that he might kill some of them, soon

had him shot, stuffed, and set up on display

nearby in their Museum of Mankind and Nature.

Living, you would not have recognized

your likeness in the body of your cousin

Bruno. You lacked optics in your eye spots

and your brain had too few cells. In death,

however, limitations of the living fall away,

or that, at least, would seem to be the premise

of my speaking to you in this poem.

You water bears, unlike your cousins,

thrive in Germany, and everywhere,

from lichens on Antarctic mountainsides

and moss along the Nile down

into the silt bed of the Coral Sea.

You can withstand extremes of heat

and cold. Irradiated, poisoned,

under crushing depths of pressure, or sent

floating into the void of outer space, you live.

Though dried-out, crumpled in a heap like duck cloth,

still, when watered, you can twitch, and come to life.

Your species has survived five hundred million years.

Just after the German, an Italian cleric

with a microscope gave you the name

from Latin tardigrade, slow stepper,

like what Beowulf calls the monster

Grendel: mearcstapa, boundary

stepper. That’s you too. It’s Bruno,

me, and every living thing, all teetering

along the edge. And look! I like the way

you move out here. To my mind, you

surpass the kingdom of heaven: you exist.

The Nationality of Neptune

The planet seafaring people call

Poseidon in the Cyclades,

speakers of one local tongue

in Veracruz call Tlaloc,

after their god of bodies

of water, storms, fertility,

and of the realm of the dead.

To delight Tlaloc Aztecs

used to dress the children

of captives and of the chosen

nobles in colorful paper smocks,

with feathers and shells.

On ceremonial mountaintops

and in caves, high priests

with obsidian knife blades

opened the children to remove

their living hearts. Their screams

and tears, some said, brought down

the blessing of rain. Others

chosen of that god they buried

with foreheads painted blue and seeds

placed on their faces. The planet

Tlaloc is not visible to the naked eye.

The Arctic Vortex at Snooks Pond, 2014

The warmest groundwater seeping into the marsh

before it froze for the first time smoked, and ice flowers

formed in the smoke. Ice petals radiated from low twigs.

Ice feathers hung from the willow trunk reflected.

Spurs took shape on the black sheen just now frozen.

Farther out on the pond, in the deep snow, powder

sifted into cracks where the old ice was contracting

with a chirp like sonar. Cracks in the snow gaped, wide

as an old man’s knuckle, crisscross, so that the pond

was a white mosaic, each tile big as a dance floor.

Tracks from a fox, and from deer and rabbits, marked

the dance steps. A man at the sight of the cracked ice,

though he knew better, felt as if he might fall through.

But the clear ice under the cracks held. It was like him.

Apologies to the Dead

1. To Ruth Stein Blum 1866–1929

Passenger pigeons came

rivering endlessly

into your childhood,

and when you were grown

the last one, Martha,

lived on display

at the Cincinnati Zoo.

She was brown and buff

and dull gray, only her eyes

bright orange, each

with a pale blue ring. 2. To Mary DeFrance 1848–1902

The census before the War has you, age fifteen,

living with a physician, thirty-five. At Shiloh

he was a surgeon with the Fourth Infantry

from Louisiana. The Union advanced,

and you fled home for Vicksburg

where the Fourth Infantry fought again.

When the smell of the rotting dead

and screams from the cracked throats

of the wounded forced both sides

to call a three-hour truce, boys

about to kill each other talked

and traded in a calm between-time

while they tended their friends.

You must have been waiting then

in one of the dirt caves under the bluff,

where people went with carpets, tables,

chairs, and beds, to weather the shelling

from Admiral Porter’s boats. Your new

husband, George Fontaine, was one of the boys

who surrendered. Later, the two of you opened

a dry-goods store in Floyd. Near there

the surgeon, who must have been your father,

murdered an immigrant in cold blood. 3. To Dr. Walter L. DeFrance 1822–?

When the Lord God bird still nested in the swamp,

at three in the afternoon, there was a warm rain.

It was Monday, the first of July, eighteen

sixty-seven. A knock came at the front door.

Herman Stein, my great-great-grandfather,

answered, and you, whose name was never

mentioned in this story, witnessed by his wife

and three small children, drew a pistol…

you, as a gentleman, having taken offense

when billed for your delinquent debt by a Jew.

My father, Kenneth, told me the story told him

by his grandmother, Ruth, who was there

as a toddler when her father died. You,

she said, having shot him in cold blood, went

unpunished, never charged with a crime.

Lately, however, I find that you did