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. Mister 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
