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

they prove

with numbers from a test

which, I’m just guessing,

is the one they use on pigs.

To Jesse James

Before you were born, your father stood

in the pulpit quoting the gospel:

“As ye would that men should do

to you, do ye also to them

likewise.” He kept five children:

to work as slaves in the hemp fields,

and their mother in the house.

When you were three, he left

for Hangtown Gold Camp

where he found what many young men

found there, cholera and an early death.

Your stepfather beat you, and your mother

replaced him soon with the Doctor,

who worked the children to raise tobacco.

Your brother Frank, having left home

at eighteen, was asleep in the Rebel camp

at dawn, when boys from the Union

crept up through the woods,

and the Battle of Wilson’s Creek

left five hundred dead around him.

In the siege at Lexington he surrendered.

Home on parole he joined a Rebel gang.

Then, you saw jayhawkers hang the Doctor

from a tree in the yard. They swung him

down to ask where Frank had gone,

and when he did not say, they swung him up again.

A year later, Frank came back with Bloody Bill’s gang,

and you joined them at sixteen to murder

the unarmed boys on the train at Centralia.

The Union infantry followed and took a position

with muskets, to pour and pack and fire

as fast as they could, but you and the gang of boys

on horseback charged with two or three revolvers each,

killing a hundred more, including some who surrendered.

You were an outlaw then for life.

You received at your work

two bullet wounds in the chest

and one in the leg.

When you were thirty-four, you, your wife, and children

shared a house with the Ford boys: Robert,

after breakfast, shot you in the back of the head,

having been promised more than he thought

to earn in a lifetime, more, in fact, than he did.

Some say, you were an excellent dancer,

courteous with the ladies. Stories tell

of your saving a widow’s farm.

They mention widows in several states.

I keep trying to see the actual man

behind the eyes in the photograph:

hair and beard cut short, jacket tweed

with a clover lapel, floppy silk bow tie:

a man of moderate style, alert to trouble

such as upholders of slavery met

in the Borderlands of your time.

Frank I see here bald at fifty-five,

big ears, turn-of-the-century three-piece suit

and sweater, wingtip collar and flowing tie,

more shoe salesman by now than robber:

Frank looks less on edge, having killed more

boys and men by far than you did.

When he returned to the farm in old age,

after your mother died, for two bits

he would show the original site of your grave

and let the visitor take a pebble

to keep as a souvenir.

There’s no connection between us, Jesse,

except the enjoyment of lives prepared by those

who made their neighbors slaves under color of law

and by armies deployed at a whim.

In the predawn dark while my mother

was giving birth to me, your namesake Jesse,

six when last you saw him at the table for breakfast,

would have been sleeping, an old man

in Los Angeles, in South Central where he lived.

He died there too, the following year, eight miles south

of where my brother Richard lives today.

Love and Empire

Napoleon in exile kept two lockets, one

from the late Marie Walewska

with a snippet of blonde hair, the other

remembering Josephine with violets

he picked beside her grave. As for himself,

he asked that his heart in spirits of wine,

preserved in a dish of silver welded

shut, be given to the second

empress, who survived him.

*

Widowed at thirty, jailed

by Robespierre, made

courtesan by his successor,

Josephine, when she laughed, hid

her ugly teeth behind her hand.

*

Napoleon two days after the wedding left for war.

He said in a letter to his wife, he longed to kiss

her breast, “and lower down, much lower.” Her replies

were cool and few; her dalliances with his rival, not.

*

Sick of his wife’s adulteries, Napoleon in Egypt

saw a woman smiling with good teeth

and sent her husband as envoy to France.

The smiling woman stayed, and with the wives

of other officers she visited the general’s house

for lunch. A parlormaid filling the water glasses

tripped and drenched the woman’s dress.

Napoleon, as though surprised, leapt up,

and led his guest into a private room where,

he insisted, she could “repair the damage.”

*

Marie Walewska, faithful as a wife

at twenty-one, according to her own

account, had spurned Napoleon.

But when he smashed his watch,

and swore that he would shatter

Poland, thus, were she not his,

she fainted, wakening after the rape

to find him soothing her, as if in love.

*

Men who saw bells fat as oxen

drop through bell towers in flames

after a month lay scattered, windblown

in a thousand fields of snow.

*

Marie Walewska spent two nights in Napoleon’s bed

on Elba, planning to stay, but he escorted her

on the third night halfway back to the boat.

In the locket she had inscribed: “Remember,

when you cease to love me, that I love you still.”

*

The perfume of the violet is sweet, though brief

because it numbs the nerve it touches.

*

Declining the gift of the dead man’s heart,

the second empress wrote to a friend:

“He did not treat me ill, as some

suppose. I would have wished him

many years of a contented life,

if only he lived them far away from me.”

From Anyte of Tegea

For you, goddess of war and wisdom,

I leave this cherrywood pike

three times the length of my body.

I have wiped from the iron leaf

the blood of men

whose lives I ended.

Soon my name and the names

of victorious kings

and kingdoms will be nothing.

Still, in the light of your

mind, goddess, may

the brave soul glimmer.

The Cormorant at Snooks Pond

After the mall tycoon paid experts to conclude

that rainbow trout can survive in water like this,

warm and rich from a wetlands, three years

after they drained the pond, and excavators

had sunk the bottom deep enough to please him,

when masons had dressed the face of the levee

for show with a stone wall high as a two-story house,

when the water rose, and the fishery stocked it

with yearlings in good health, a few days later,

the trout were already slow, and a cormorant came

to fish beside the dam. The mall tycoon keeps

weakening with age, and now his