Mister Toebones
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