Mister Toebones Read online

  Also by Brooks Haxton

  Poetry

  They Lift Their Wings to Cry

  Uproar

  Nakedness, Death, and the Number Zero

  The Sun at Night

  Traveling Company

  Dead Reckoning

  Dominion

  The Lay of Eleanor and Irene

  Translations

  My Blue Piano by Else Lasker-Schüler

  Victor Hugo: Selected Poems

  Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus

  Dances for Flute and Thunder: Praises, Prayers, and Insults

  Nonfiction

  Fading Hearts on the River

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2021 by Brooks Haxton

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Haxton, Brooks, [date] author.

  Title: Mister Toebones : poems / Brooks Haxton.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020017755 (print) | LCCN 2020017756 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593318522 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593318539 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

  Classification: LCC PS3558.A825 M57 2021 (print) | LCC PS3558.A825 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020017755

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020017756

  Ebook ISBN 9780593318539

  Cover photograph of Richard Haxton by Brooks Haxton

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  To Daniel Moriarty

  native brook trout…their backs

  Purple-black and traced with gray…like

  Maps, dream maps, like no maps

  I could ever hope to draw or follow.

  —Daniel Moriarty

  No, I can’t say as ever I was lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.

  —Daniel Boone

  Contents

  Canoe

  The Other World

  Mister Toebones, Called in Several Languages the Reaper

  To Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham

  After the Snow Squall

  Olm

  Early in the Christian Empire

  The Featherbed

  Copernicus

  We Could Say Oỷρανóς

  Sea Cave

  Catullus, Carmen III

  Catullus, Carmen VIII

  Essential Tremor

  To Josephine Chamberlain Ayres Haxton

  Under the Searchlight of a Robot Sub

  The Loving Essence of the Duckmole

  Observations from a Hillside Stairway on the Day of Atonement, Just Before My Wife and Daughters Break Their Fast

  Kropotkin and the Lake on Mars

  Thanks to the Makers of Shells

  Message, 1944

  Unlit Kitchen, 5 A.M.

  To Floyd, Louisiana

  Sunset, Mare Spumans

  From the Journal of Dr. Beaurieux

  To the Water Bear

  The Nationality of Neptune

  The Arctic Vortex at Snooks Pond, 2014

  Apologies to the Dead

  Flower Medley

  Eclipse

  Near Saturn

  Lingerie Femme and the Vagaries of Pronunciation

  To Bald Eagle

  Circa 1961

  Oceanic

  To Sirius B

  A Voter from Mississippi Considers the State Constitution

  A Cat Lover’s Guide to The Bell Curve

  To Jesse James

  Love and Empire

  From Anyte of Tegea

  The Cormorant at Snooks Pond

  Bananas

  The Moons of Jupiter

  Don’t Get Me Wrong

  Tracks Everywhere at Noon

  The Bewilderment

  To the Moon

  Transit of Venus, 1882

  Qoheleth

  Where But to Think Is to Be Full of Sorrow

  Fig Preserves

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Canoe

  A damselfly lit on the inside seam at my knee,

  her tail tip blue as a blue flame.

  She flitted away.

  Nothing was settled by now. Nothing was certain.

  Ten thousand riffle bugs twitched on the pond.

  My boat kept drifting into the cattails.

  Another damselfly there lit on the inside seam

  at my knee. She flitted. She lit again, on my knuckle.

  Everything so far had already happened.

  Everything else was about to happen.

  Bluegill swam under the boat.

  A redfin pickerel hovered and darted away.

  Again I had fallen in love

  with my wife, when I thought

  I might lose her, and I was the one lost.

  There was a slow leak in the hull by my foot.

  The wind blew hard, and a dragonfly

  soared straight into it.

  When I tried to row home, the prow

  kept swinging about in the wind.

  It was easier backwards.

  The prow with each stroke dipped

  and rocked up wobbling out of the water.

  The Other World

  They found the skeleton of a man

  under the grass at Crooked Lake.

  His people left him in his grave

  a chariot with spoked wheels

  and heads of horses in full tack,

  with severed leg bones posed to strut

  at the instruction of the dead.

  From a burial site of the Eastern

  Han comes a galloping horse

  in bronze, lips and nostrils

  flared, right hind hoof set

  on the sturdy back of a swallow

  who turns her head as if

  surprised to carry him in flight.

  Mister Toebones, Called in Several Languages the Reaper

  Phalangium opilio

  A daddy longlegs on an oak leaf at the cemetery

  froze and started bobbing. Children in the country

  used to pick these up by one leg. They said,

  Grandfather graybeard, tell me where my cattle are,

  or I will kill you. Where he pointed, waving

  with another leg, they looked, and now their names

  were chiseled on the stones around me, Grace

  and Samuel and Sarah. Mister Toebones

  is a name they would have liked: I took it

  from the Latin. He quit bobbing. With his second

  legs now, which were the longest, he was reaching

  into the air for molecules as vivid to his toes

  as memories to an old man’s brain. I can remember

  from my childhood Grace gone quiet

  on her deathbed. People say that the daddy longlegs

  bears the deadliest known venom. Miste
r Toebones

  bears no venom and bites nobody but little worms

  and larvae. My father showed me in the turret

  on the reaper’s head the two eyes mounted

  left and right. With one of these he must

  have seen me at my father’s grave. He must

  have tasted with a bristle on his second

  forefoot just a touch of something human.

  To Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham

  I just found out, Hasan, your full name means

  Father of the Most High,

  the Good or Handsome,

  son again of the Handsome,

  son of the Young Eagle.

  I am son of Kenneth,

  son again of Kenneth,

  which means Handsome, like Hasan.

  My first name Ellis also, like Ali,

  claims God as my salvation.

  As for Haxton: in your time, I think,

  in Hawks-town, my namesakes trained falcons,

  not the Sons of Eagles maybe, but their kin.

  Our names are synonyms.

  But more than that, Hasan,

  though dead a thousand years,

  you came to me when I was young.

  When I taught children in sixth grade

  to make a pinhole camera

  from a cardboard box,

  with photographic paper for their film,

  although I did not know it then,

  this was a gift I passed along from you

  to them, and inside this

  they formed from light their images.

  One girl I taught that spring

  spiked such a fever in her brain

  she died. At twelve from a mosquito bite

  she died. They dug her grave nearby

  in Minnesota where we lived,

  in the state of water mirroring the sky.

  But first, Hasan, because of you,

  a thousand threads of light

  inside the darkness of a little box

  preserved this image of her face.

  After the Snow Squall

  When the crescent

  hung in the clear

  with Mars and Venus

  over the frozen lake,

  the dean

  in the parking lot

  could see

  that the darker region

  shone from a shimmer

  of noon waves

  on the Pacific,

  so that the lunar lakes

  and seas appeared

  as brightly Earth-lit

  as she had ever seen them,

  and she wondered

  how she would look

  from there,

  from the Marsh of Decay

  at lunar midnight,

  here on the just-past-full

  Earth where the edge

  had been shaven

  into the darkness.

  Olm

  Proteus anguinus

  Salamanders used to live in fire,

  but these live underwater, underground,

  in bone-cold darkness without air, some of them

  for more than a hundred years. They look like snakes

  with feet and human skin, the pale snake’s head

  without a face, inane, all baby pink

  and slippery: no eyes that you can see,

  no ears, no nose, no mouth, or almost none…

  gills at the neck, branching on either side,

  blood red, like lungs turned inside out. The first

  Slovenians who saw these wriggling, flushed

  into the light by heavy rains, considered them

  human fish. Such human fish, they reasoned,

  with such winglike gills, they must have been

  the spawn of dragons. Near the olm the earliest

  vampire lived, a peasant by the name of Jure

  Grando, Big George. He rose from the grave

  at night to find his widow, whom he raped

  while smiling, she said, from the effort

  to draw breath. The neighbors wanted to drive

  a stake into his heart, and they tried hawthorn,

  which is a hard wood from an enchanted tree

  blossoming at the mouth of the cave

  into the other world, but hawthorn would not

  pierce Big George’s heart. The village priest

  reminded the corpse, where it lay smiling still

  after they dug it up, that Jesus did not suffer

  on the cross to make that ghoulish smile

  complacent, and a man named Stipan (Steve)

  stepped forward, saw in hand. He sawed off

  George’s head while everybody watched the coffin

  fill with blood. The first book to describe this

  was the first to describe the olm as well,

  The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola, Nuremberg,

  1689. When prey is scarce, the olm chillaxes

  sometimes, motionless for ten years, to wait.

  His heftier cousin in the subterranean lakes

  of Central Mexico is called the water monster,

  or axolotl…monster, here, in the older sense

  of cosmic omen, a creature which the indigenous

  people find, though near extinction, tasty.

  Early in the Christian Empire

  Constantine had his first son, commander

  of fleets and legions, heir presumptive,

  put to death by hanging. Also the empress,

  not much older than her stepson, he had

  choked by steam in an overheated bath.

  This Constantine deemed merciful.

  His sons by her he placed years later,

  all three, on imperial thrones. Soon

  they murdered their most eminent kin.

  In a few years the eldest brother fell

  in a war to kill the youngest. Then, the death

  of the youngest, dragged from hiding

  in a church by men supposedly his own

  and butchered, left only the one most feared.

  Half his army died in the deadliest battle

  ever fought by Rome, while he hid nearby:

  Church historians have him rapt in prayer.

  On his deathbed in a fever, having murdered

  the next-to-last of his cousins, he saw,

  finally, he was to be succeeded by the last.

  The Featherbed

  in the presidential suite

  was the wettest we’ve ever seen

  from the standpoint of pee.

  Copernicus

  After he took his priestly vow, my uncle proposed,

  they say, to the rector’s daughter. She bore his son,

  in any case, and married another man. Later

  my uncle had me take my vow. Men of the cloth

  elected him Prince-Bishop. His son was mayor.

  I was a canon for life, and his physician. In my study

  at the episcopal palace I translated from Greek

  a book of poems in praise of moral truth,

  and of the prostitutes and beauties of Byzantium.

  I dedicated these to him. At forty I moved

  from the palace into the tower of a cathedral

  in a fishing village. There, observing the heavens

  when I could, I managed coin and property for the state.

  My housekeeper when I was old was banished

  by my onetime friend, the new Prince-Bishop,

 
; who alleged that she was more to me than I would say.

  Devotion, meanwhile, to the loving mind of God

  made unacceptable the nest of calibrated rings

  with Earth at the center and a tiny Sun in orbit.

  This, the science of a thousand years, I took

  in hand, to measure by its rule my thought,

  to set aside the old, ungainly universe, and leave

  God’s body true to its own motion naked.

  We Could Say Oỷρανóς

  Whoever thinks that urinous

  has canceled the pun in your anus

  needs a clue: with oo from clue

  and awss from sauce we could

  say oor-a-NAWSS. Homer

  said that, and he did not need to see

  to call a god by name. Those

  who could see Ouranos back then

  saw only a speck. Nobody knew

  the speck was a planet. Nobody

  knew what planets were.

  Ouranos was a blue-green orb

  spun backwards on its side

  with an aurora at its belt and moons

  and rings and a magnetic field

  warped every which way. Winds blow

  stronger there than storms that upend

  double-wides in Kansas. Once in a while

  a meteor big as I am, older maybe

  than the Moon, sails into a wind

  like that, and burns, and flashes,

  oblivious, under a cloud of ice.

  Sea Cave

  Beyond the mouth of a stairwell

  they may find under the sweep

  of their dive lights blue crab

  and American lobster, swimming

  sideways, swimming backwards,

  walking the platform where I walked

  among the millions brought and left

  and carried away aboard the IRT.

  Catullus, Carmen III

  Mourn, O gods of love and mortal lovers.

  Mourn. My girlfriend’s sparrow, apple

  of her eye, is dead, the one she dandled

  in her lap, and let hop here and there