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

trout are failing him.

But the dam he built will outlast everyone living.

Bananas

A monkey with the muttonchops and lips

of Henrik Ibsen barked, and creatures

on the forest floor stood still to sniff

and listen. There, a traveler might pick,

according to Jules Verne, a fruit “healthy

as bread and succulent as cream.” Buddha

ate bananas in that realm. And Jesus

would have loved them, if he lived nearby,

or later. Muhammad with his wisdom

brought about the great diffusion of bananas

west, into the Andalusian caliphate where Berbers

ate black figs. Experts say, banana, Spanish,

comes from Portuguese, from Wolof

slave merchants who got it from the Berbers’

Arabic, banaana, meaning finger. They

don’t know. Fine tailors made kimonos

for the summer heat from fabric woven

of the softest, innermost banana leaf. Bashō

wore bashofu, one student says, and wrote

while kneeling on a carpet of banana silk.

After United Fruit made sweet bananas

cheap and plentiful, former rabbi Eli Black

acquired the company and paid his workers,

in good conscience, six times more,

but when the company, and then his conscience,

and then bribes and tax schemes, failed,

he took his briefcase, bashed the window

from an office forty-four floors up,

and threw his papers and himself

out of the New York skyline into the street.

The Moons of Jupiter

My wife and I looked after they found one

about the size of Hawaii, and a smaller one

shaped like a russet potato with craters

for eyes, not that we saw them. What we saw

was the neighborhood where we lived, lit

by streetlights in the rain. My wife said

Patsy Cline had fallen out of a sky like that

in Tennessee years earlier. A pilot

with too little training thought he could fly her

home in a storm. Jupiter has one old storm

about the size of Alaska, and seventy-nine moons,

most with a surface area less than that of the state

park in Topanga Canyon. Two of the four moons

Galileo saw have crusts of ice with oceans

underneath. Mountain lions live in Topanga

Canyon, inside the city limits of LA. Unusual

salamanders live there too. Nobody knows

what lives in the ocean under the ice

on Europa. Nothing would be my guess.

Don’t Get Me Wrong

In praise of George Starbuck and his poem “Of Late”

My younger colleague told me, when I praised the poem

of a dead white man, that this was microaggression.

I tried to explain that the poem protested aggression too,

during the war in Vietnam. By bashing McNamara,

then the secretary of defense, the poem advocated peace.

My colleague said he advocated peace by bashing me.

Differences in scale and point of view may be deceptive.

Gamma rays, for example, with a wavelength of one

micromicron, leave an infinitesimal fleck in photographs

of space where a star far larger than most exploded

light-years from the Milky Way. The Milky Way

from out there is another fleck, adrift in the limitless

dark with galaxies flung in all directions, each

at its core having crushed into a pinhole several

million times the mass of the Sun. When power

bears down, things get full of themselves sometimes

and send out bad vibes everywhere. One gamma burst

nearby, according to professors in Kansas, killed

most living things on Earth. But that was before

what we call consciousness, when living things

were small, and nobody cared. Lately, hydrogen

bombs make bad vibes too, and the atoms

are only a few gamma wavelengths across.

The poem about the war maintains that dropping

napalm on an innocent civilian is no less wrong

when you call your target the enemy aggressor.

My colleague and I agree. What we’ve got here,

Cool Hand Luke reminded the Walking Boss

(who promptly shot him dead), is a failure

to communicate. The poem blames smug

white men for bombing people said to be less

white, though it doesn’t mention gender or the color

of anyone’s skin. I met the poet in an elevator

when I was a mailboy where he taught, and his skin

had that pink tone of Angora cat lips, slightly muted.

The dazzle in his mind, prodigious then, is gone.

But poems of his, if you care to read them, come alive.

Tracks Everywhere at Noon

Where a bobcat leapt across the vanishing

rafter of prints from a turkey tom

with jakes and hens, to look

at the tracks and picture the animals

in the act of leaving them took me

out of myself as a boy, the way it did

to walk out waist deep into the River.

Hidden in all that water from woods

and fields in thirty states one drop,

I was thinking, might have melted weeks back

under a marmot asleep on the ice

near Three Forks, and that one drop might

in another month glide over the blacktip fin

of a shark downstream across the Gulf.

Almost everything was hidden: eels

in the cool dark underwater at noon

with spoonbill catfish, and snapping turtles

bigger and older than I would ever be.

Behind the blue there had to be planets,

thousands, with living creatures I could never

imagine, and clusters of stars afloat on the surge

of nothing out of nowhere. The current

where I stood in the full noon sun felt cool

on my legs and hands, a mile wide,

moving steadily as the River of Heaven,

which (fifty years later) landed me here

on the solid ice of a big pond with a dog

we brought home cowering from the pound.

So here she went now, after a few months free

from harm, galloping into the blizzard at noon,

springing into the drifts, beside herself to smell

tracks everywhere, crisscross, filled with snow.

The Bewilderment

My friend in high school said, God

love her, Yes, and there was nookie,

and we saw that it was good. And lay

bewildered on a sandbar which the River

washed into the Gulf. And in her brother’s

treehouse, which was broken, as were we.

We said goodbye, and in another world

I walked out onto the rubble of Our Lady

of the Caves and Beasts in Ephesus.

Where a patchwork column stands

I stood. And dreamed. And met a college girl

with whom I shared hashish, and crabs.

She wanted to be the one on top, and it was

nookie prelapsarian as light in heaven.

Later, in the Rust Belt, in a heat wave,

God’s apocalyptic messenger downtown

kept shouting: Torment is eternal

and the Lake of Fire awaits. I looked him

in the eye and fell through helpless.

But