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

not

shoot my kinsman in cold blood.

Newspapers report: it was a stabbing.

The Times-Picayune includes with other

news from the region one short paragraph

on the murder. This comes after a farmer’s

complaint that steady rains have made grass

grow up over his cotton. In the mud, he says,

the freedmen cannot plow. The next paragraph

reports the murder, noting that any one

of the nine stab wounds would have been fatal.

Another farmer says that his corn is healthy,

but that worms may yet develop. In The Daily

Memphis Avalanche a quote from The Carroll

Record states that you were “legally arrested”;

but, “to the surprise and disappointment of all,”

you made your escape.

That night would have been

cloudy with no moon. In the unusual darkness,

it would seem, you found that you could evade

your captors. Something of this kind kept happening

in Louisiana. Of white men who had committed

that year more than two hundred illegal shootings,

stabbings, hangings, whippings, and beatings

of the legally free, not one was charged with a crime.

The newspapers’ mention of legal arrest in this case

makes it appear that stabbing a Jew nine times

at his home in front of his wife and children might

be thought unacceptable.

No further record exists

of you as Dr. DeFrance, except your expulsion

the following year from the Masonic Lodge.

The census from eighteen fifty listed you

as a farmer, head of household, Laura, your wife,

baby Ada, and Mary, then two years of age.

This was in Mississippi. In Louisiana,

as Doctor DeFrance, you were three years younger

than the farmer would be, and lived alone

with Mary, three years older than the farmer’s child.

Why would someone have made the two of you

on record six years closer in age, and how

might this bear on the savagery of the murder?

Who invented the story about the bill and the handgun?

What rage, Walter, drove you there,

to the front door, out of your mind, with a knife? 4. To Mary Terrell Howard Sessions Defrance 1775–1833

You must have been one

of the orphans and foundlings

shipped from Europe to be the wives

of men in the colonial South.

After the Revolutionary War,

according to family records, you

at the age of eight gave birth.

Maybe the records are mistaken.

But by the time there was a Bill

of Rights, you had four boys:

Asa, Robert, James, and Frederick.

And you were sixteen. Then your husband,

at the age of thirty-three, seems

to have turned his attention

elsewhere, fathering twins

by another girl, whose name

and age I cannot find.

After your first four boys

were grown, you became

at forty-one the wife

of another man to whom

you bore three sons,

Parke, Walter, and Charles,

you for the last of these past fifty.

Your one girl seems to have died

as a child. You died

when you were fifty-eight.

You were twelve years

dead when Walter named

his first girl Mary after you.

Walter then, in middle age,

stabbed my kinsman

Herman Stein nine times.

I cannot tell you why,

in front of a man’s wife

and three children, your boy

Walter would stab and stab

and stab the man, nine times…

I cannot say what good

your Walter may have done

with his surgical knife

at Shiloh or at Vicksburg,

in the worst of the battles

where he served…

nor what harm he did

before the War, to his wife

who left him, or to his children,

your grandchildren,

Ada and Mary…Mary,

whom he gave your name…

Flower Medley

after lines by Hayden Carruth, 1921–2008

Before the spasms tore his heart,

before the doctors tethered him

with oxygen, and blinded him, he breathed,

out walking with good friends, a raft

of hyacinth in Brooklyn, and the white bloom

of the blue plum broke. Daylilies came back

in summer with orange tongues of flame.

The sour cherry four years dead

bloomed one morning in October,

and a red hibiscus dropped onto the floor.

Because he put these into poems,

the old geranium still holds ten blossoms.

The moth he called Catocala, or hidden beauty,

frets, and beats the screen. For love

he named them, not just moths, or flowers:

stones, and animals, musicians by the score.

Today the purple shoots of hellebore

have broken through the frozen dirt.

Doctors, he reminded me, once brewed

from hellebore a cure for madness—

he looked up—and it was deadly.

I loved Hayden when he laughed.

Eclipse

August 28, 2007

While the Moon sank into a reef of clouds,

the shadow I had come to see slid down

past craters formed a billion years before

life formed on Earth.

My father at eighty

lost three quarts of blood inside his gut

and buckled in my arms, so that we both

fell at his bedside. On the floor he told me,

eyes relaxing, quiet, No, he would be fine,

please, not to call the ambulance.

From him

when I was twelve I learned to watch the Moon

with his refractor scope, imagining

the surface as a texture human hands

could touch. Now he was gone, and I stood

in a field alone among half-moonlit rocks.

After my mother’s sweetheart died in the War,

my father, who had been her college friend,

thought they might make a life. Third

to form in my mother’s womb,

on the third day I was a mulberry of cells

suspended in the dark inside her.

In a book of myths she gave me as a child

the god of the Moon in Egypt is a scribe

delivering his wisdom to the dead.

Now one crow flapped though shelves of mist

into the floodlit aura of a mall

beyond the woods, and half in shadow,

half in clouds, the Moon kept sinking.

The Morning Star in Babylon, the book

said, was a goddess toward whom women

cried in childbirth, one who turned

toward men by dawn the cryptic sexual look

in light of which the brave supposedly seek war.

My parents’ love misled them into betrayal

and confusion. When my father turned

for comfort toward young men, the way

my mother did for years with women,

she divorced him. I was confused less

by their pain than by the numbing in myself.

Later in middle age my wife tried cursing me

to ask for love, and I withdrew. At my feet,

at the edge of a field now, rocks no longer moonlit

tilted toward the Morning Star in the east.

Near Saturn

Snowflakes drifted unseen

onto the floor of a lake.

Salts of cyanide fell nearby

in the rainfall over the crags.

Other moons appeared

to the instruments of the eye,

some cratered, one smooth, one of them

spouting water crystals into space.

And we could see odd shapes less

moonlike, Epi-metheus and Pro-metheus

meaning After-thought and Fore-thought

shepherding rocks and ice

in the rings. And others, moonlets,

were