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

invisible, smaller, nameless, most,

like most of what there was and is,

even to the mind’s eye dark.

Lingerie Femme and the Vagaries of Pronunciation

From vagari, Latin, meaning wander,

comes vah-GEHR-ee, an eccentric whim,

or deviation in the fickle mind. Vagaries

are not instances of vagueness, though the new

pronunciation, VAYG-uh-reez, has blurred

the meaning. Let’s not blur the meaning. Aks

for ask was standard during the reign

of Aelfric. If a bigot tells you aks is wrong,

remind him that King Eadgar and Queen

Aelfthryth disagreed. This error is not

trivial, though to err, Pope said, is human,

and he did say uhr, not ehr. To air is what

the British do not do with dirty linen.

Flax, speaking of linen, is the proper sound

in flaccid, which, like accident,

and unlike acid, has two cees. Lingerie

is French for linen. I struggle to accept

(two cees, ak-sept) that in this country

lingerie is lawnjuhray. It’s sad. I love

to mangle French as much as anyone,

and if it made me feel indecent

lawnjuhray would be a triumph,

but it calls to my mind someone

injured in a folding lawn chair.

To Bald Eagle

You were a good workhorse,

gentle for children to ride.

When I leaned forward on your neck

and whispered, I could feel it

that you understood me.

Even in your old age Henry Davis

would have you prance, and he swung down

from the height of your back, easy

out of the saddle when he was eighty.

The mule that shared your stall

for years, Henry told us after he hauled

your body away from the house,

stood screaming over what was left,

for three days. Then, for a few more seasons,

Henry ploughed his cornfield with the mule.

Now, fifty years later, I’m whispering this to myself.

Circa 1961

Titanis walleri

A flightless raven taller than a man

kept chasing me into the ditch along the road.

Nightmare logic made the bird too slow

ever to catch me, but it also made me

stumble. Sea cows, hundreds of miles southeast,

slipped, meanwhile, through clear springs

into the tea-brown tannic brew

of the Lower Santa Fe, a river

famous for disappearing underground

and coming up out of nowhere. There,

in scuba gear, Ben Waller did

palaeoarchaeology for fun. He sank

his bare hands into the silt on bottom

to feel his way along for hidden shapes.

He found whole points of pre-Columbian spears,

and once the fossilized ankle

of the most frightening bird

ever to walk this Earth.

Waller’s job for Civil Defense

was diving to bring back bodies of divers

lost in local caves. The anklebone

he found was what they call

Titanis walleri, a bird the size of the one

in my contemporaneous nightmare.

Two million years before,

that species may have made the laugh

the seriema makes now in Brazil.

The seriema can catch a snake in her beak,

whip it into the ground,

and swallow it whole, head first.

With a similar motion, they say,

Titanis, to protect her chicks,

could bring down cats as big as tigers.

She did this by driving her beak

hook first into the cat’s spine—

head, an eagle’s head more massive

than a battle-ax, swung down

by the muscle-bound neck of an emu

twice the size of my father, who was tall,

and, I should tell you, kind,

but who happened to own the black

totemic carving of a crow

which came to life enormous in my dreams.

Oceanic

1.

Again an oriole has hung her nest

among the cottonwoods just

farther north, and soon

inside the Baltimore hotel

where my grandparents stood

as newlyweds big horseshoe crabs

will scuttle over the lobby floor

while high tide laps

through busted

window frames and doors. 2.

When the north wind came down

out of the cedars

onto the bay

the boat turned slowly

as the needle of a compass

does in the palm of a man

turning to find himself

on a map. 3.

Far down, under a sky without a moon or stars,

when the dive light failed and the current

along the wall of the reef gained force,

he turned to find the lights of the others

gone. Things in the total dark, even

his own hands now, seemed hypothetical,

and deep inside the ear the velocity of his heart.

To Sirius B

Your sister, the Dog Star, was the brightest.

You, the Pup, nobody even saw, until one night

in eighteen sixty-two, when a young man

with a telescope of his own devise looked up,

and there, where the wobble in your sister’s gait

suggested you might be, you were, a white dwarf.

Scientists, when they could read your temperature,

said a thimbleful of you must weigh a ton.

Fusion had to have ceased, they thought,

for you to be so dense. Though white hot

you were defunct at the core, already yellowing,

dead in other words. After the yellow,

they predicted, would come dull red, duller

and duller, until you disappeared. Your sister,

meanwhile, and the Sun would also be white

dwarves. Mercury, Venus, Earth, and the Moon,

before that, during the Sun’s red-giant phase,

would have been vaporized in the expanding

sphere and thrown off into nebulous plumes.

A Voter from Mississippi Considers the State Constitution

Article 12, Section 241 on Franchise: Concerning the Exception for Idiots and Insane Persons

Words ring empty without love,

but we do in the strictest sense

rank idiots below the imbeciles

and imbeciles below the morons.

Idiots we deem unfit to vote.

This is the law. In May of 1954,

soon after Brown vs. Board of Education,

Senator James Eastland in his third term

said that segregation is the law

of nature. It keeps racial harmony,

he said. His people a year later

murdered Emmett Till.

During his fourth term they killed

Evers, Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman.

During his fifth, nearby in Tennessee,

they murdered King. Those deemed

worthy of the vote made Eastland senator

six times. When Eastland was a boy

they made James Vardaman

their governor, then senator.

Vardaman in his first campaign

for governor said education spoiled

good field hands, and he advocated

lynching. Our state constitution

for a time required that voters

demonstrate sound moral character.

That statute was repealed.

A Cat Lover’s Guide to The Bell Curve

Pigs may be the most intelligent

of the domestic animals,

but next to pigs cats look like

geniuses for diet, caterwauling

sex, longevity, and hygiene.

Sows suffocate their young

by accident, or swallow them

alive on whim. I’ve seen them

puke their breakfast in the dirt

and eat it warm for lunch, their faces

smeared with shit. The poor,

some experts say, are less intelligent

than the rich. This