To the Left of Time Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I

  Cow Chases Boys

  Haystack of Needles

  Nullius in Verba (Take Nobody’s Word for it)

  Indigo Felix:

  The Horse Poisoner

  A Long Line of Nightingales,

  My Father Whistled

  Double Barrel Sparrow

  For My Sister

  The Milking Stool

  Glass Eye

  Manure Pile Covered in Snow

  So Bury Me in a Barrel

  The Day

  Grade Schools’ Large Windows

  II: ODES

  Ode to the Joyful Ones

  Ode to the Eating Establishment Where the Utensils Were Chained to the Table,

  Ode to the Fire Hydrant

  Ode While Awaiting Execution

  Ode to What I Have Forgotten

  Ode to the Eraser as Big as a Bus

  Ode Elaborating on the Obvious

  Ode to All Songs, Poems, Stories That Begin “I Woke Up This Morning”

  Ode to IQ And Aptitude Tests,

  Ode to the Unbroken World, Which Is Coming

  Ode to the Electric Fish That Eat Only the Tails of Other Electric Fish,

  Ode to Small Islands

  Ode to Peep Tubes and Their Makers

  Ode to Chronic Insolvency

  Ode to the Pig Rolled from the Castle down a Hill to Where the Peasants Wait with Axes

  Ode to Gandhi, Who Wrote a Letter to Hitler Asking Him Not to Start a War

  Ode to Pain in the Absence of an Obvious Cause of Pain

  Ode to the Fat Child Who Went First onto the Thin Ice

  Ode to the Moment Between Dust and Dust

  Ode to Those Who Study the Miasmas

  Ode to the River That Abandons One Channel and Finds Another More Suited to Its Purpose

  Ode to Asa Bundy Sheffey,

  Ode to the Archipelagoes of Discarded Chewing Gum on Sidewalks

  Ode to Scars

  Ode to Lichen

  III

  A Man’s Little Heart’s Short Fever Fit

  There’s a Word for It

  Blue with Collapse

  Praisegod Barebones

  Attila the Hun Meets Pope Leo I

  Along the Trail of Your Vertebral Spine

  For Second Lieutenant J. Wesley Rosenquest,

  Tristan da Cunha

  Oofty Goofty

  Lobotomobile

  History Island

  Frank Stanford at Sixty-three

  Onomatomania,

  The Nervo-Sanguine

  Ancient Blades

  Credits

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2016 by Thomas Lux

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lux, Thomas, date, author.

  Title: To the left of time / Thomas Lux.

  Description: Boston : Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015047705 (print) | LCCN 2016000537 (ebook)

  ISBN 9780544649651 (softcover) | ISBN 9780544649668 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: POETRY / American / General. | POETRY / General.

  Classification: LCC PS3562.U87 A6 2016 (print) | LCC PS3562.U87 (ebook)

  DDC 811/.54—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047705

  Cover design by Jackie Shepherd

  v1.0416

  —for Jennifer

  What do I erroneously assume that I know?

  —Montaigne

  I

  Cow Chases Boys

  What we were thinking

  was bombing the cows with dirtballs

  from the top of the sandbank,

  at the bottom of which ran a cave-cold

  brook, spring-born.

  We knew the cows would pass below

  to drink, and we’d pried our clumps of dirt

  from a crumbling ledge. Here,

  August lasted a million years.

  There was no we, I can tell you that now.

  I did this alone. At one cow

  I knew as old and cloudy-eyed,

  I threw the dirtballs as if it were a sport

  at which I was skilled.

  Boom, a puff of dust off her hip, boom, boom: drilled

  her ribs, and neck, and one more

  too close to where she made her milk.

  She swung around and chased me up an apple tree.

  Her rage surprised me, and her alacrity.

  She looked up. I looked down at her.

  As such with many things, I did this alone.

  We both knew we’d soon be called home.

  Haystack of Needles

  With the loft full, stacked with bales

  almost to where the bats hung,

  the barn exhaled

  hay-smell, which filled and built

  an ache in our lungs.

  Some bales broke open and made piles of loose hay,

  which we gathered into one great mound

  and then climbed to the top of the bales

  (we’d made a kind of stairway)

  and jumped. We wanted to land feet-first,

  or sitting, and not on the heads

  of those who leapt before us.

  Not one of us was dumb enough

  to try a flip, or dive: You’ll break your neck!

  or You’ll put an eye out! we heard too often.

  With whom did I take these leaps?

  My friends, my cousins, and a neighbor girl.

  She kissed me back. I’d kissed her first.

  That night, in the bathtub, a hundred tiny hay-cuts

  on my arms, neck, knees, sang

  kiss me again, kiss me—and each one stung.

  Nullius in Verba (Take Nobody’s Word for it)

  Don’t recall reading that in HS Latin class.

  If implicit could be nailed to the wall, it was implicit

  you took the teacher’s word for it.

  I was a poor student

  and needed extra tutoring.

  On Saturday mornings,

  a defrocked priest in the family

  drilled me at his mother’s house.

  Nullius in verba never came up.

  I required help with algebra, too.

  I didn’t believe an x could equal a y.

  I still don’t. In fact, I believe

  algebra is a conspiracy,

  of what and by whom I can’t say here,

  but I have proof. Latin, at least, is a language.

  A good language, and it isn’t dead.

  Read Catullus. Take my word for it,

  it’s anything but dead!

  Indigo Felix:

  The fruitful search (may each search

  for a child be fruitful!), now

  the motto of modern-day dowsers,

  those who look for water with a forkèd stick.

  Some say it doesn’t work, and many proved

  it might. Well diggers hold secrets, and to dig

  and drill so deep, through dirt and rock,

  they must know where the water hides,

  where it runs coldest, and clear.

  I knew a well digger who put his ear

  to the ground. Always his left.

  He’d tap a tree’s tendons with a stone />
  and put his thumb to the spot to feel

  which way, and how deep, the taproots reached.

  He knew everything underground

  in our county. He’d find a vein

  and send a drill right to it.

  He required only that you ask

  few questions, pay him a fair wage,

  and sign at the bottom of the page.

  The Horse Poisoner

  No one knew why horses were dying—two from two farms over,

  one in town, three at the poor farm (not in great shape

  anyway, so no

  concern at first), then the mayor’s son’s pony,

  then three stalls in a row

  at the local sulky track. The vet sent blood to the State Police,

  who sent it to Boston for “further analysis.”

  Meanwhile, two more died.

  One so old it was no surprise

  and another mistaken for a deer and shot.

  Some people wanted to make a connection,

  but the errant hunter was cousin to the sheriff

  and was known as too dim to pull off

  a string of horse poisonings.

  There were no more suspicious deaths

  in the county for two months. Then three, lying down

  next to one another, seen first by my cousin Freddy

  at dawn in the town square.

  He delivered newspapers.

  Horses rarely lie down flat

  unless they’re sick, or dead.

  Test results came back

  from Boston and, Freddy said, also the Feds.

  Inconclusive, though each necropsy

  showed that the poison

  was delivered with the aid of a carrot

  or a sugar cube in a carrot.

  A Long Line of Nightingales,

  wings tied behind their backs,

  were marched through our town

  when I was a boy, thirty or forty of them.

  The beaks of some were broken, all

  were battered, dropping a feather here and there,

  which gathered, in a breeze, against the curb.

  Many people laughed at them

  or were angry, shouting, red-faced.

  Some of the nightingales begged for water.

  Several people refused, many did not.

  As long as the line, more or less, kept moving,

  the guards turned away and took water and whiskey.

  My father gave one prisoner water

  from the garden hose,

  holding it to make a fountain,

  and then he gave him a smoke

  and lit it (remember, his wings,

  behind . . . ?) for him.

  This wasn’t the Bataan Death March.

  We heard they went to a camp in the hills,

  a few miles from Marthasville.

  At the barber shop,

  my father heard none ever tried to escape,

  none. Even when their wings

  were untied, even when their wings

  and wounds were healed—they could fly!—not one

  contemplated escape.

  My Father Whistled

  only when he was nervous

  about fixing something, anything.

  It was an aptitude he lacked.

  He worked as a weaver

  in a silk mill, then as a chauffeur,

  and then he fell

  into his life’s work, at which he excelled:

  he drove a truck filled

  with clinking milk bottles,

  and deposited them on doorsteps,

  front and back, and some even in the fridge.

  I called it whistling, but there was little or no

  sound: he’d make the whistle-lips

  and blow a song of air, of breath,

  hitting the muffled higher notes

  when the nut did not fit the bolt,

  when a belt needed an extra hole . . .

  He put the snow chains on himself.

  He’d usually get it done.

  He never asked for help,

  and was given none.

  Double Barrel Sparrow

  He was a dingy bush- and ground-

  hopper, gray-brown,

  head so tiny it seemed he had none.

  In hard winters, they’re the only birds you see;

  wings too stubby to flap south.

  They gain a climate coat and bear it.

  They live off the seeds of weeds.

  They are savage birds and harm no one,

  which is why I nodded to him

  (he seemed to be nodding to me)

  as I lifted my 16-gauge

  to where he perched on a branch

  and gave him both barrels about four inches

  from his chest, if you could call it a chest.

  He was there, then vapor.

  All but his feet and an inch of orange legs,

  each capped with a bead of blood.

  His little talons held the branch until a breeze

  knocked them over, but not off,

  where they hung and swung back and forth

  like the swing’s chains on a playground

  seconds after a child has left it for the slide

  or, best of all, the monkey bars.

  For My Sister

  Forever we’ve never spoken.

  First, our mother died

  and, soon after, our father.

  He would’ve loved you, and I understood why

  when your niece, my daughter, arrived.

  You’d look like her. She is already twenty-five.

  Were you younger than me, or older?

  I always wished for younger.

  Mother starved to death, in truth.

  For many months she couldn’t swallow

  (the Dr. wrote somewhere what it’s called)

  and refused a nutrients tube.

  I’d feed her ice cream sodas with a spoon.

  Father didn’t know what to do

  when his legs were lost beneath him.

  They lived to a great age in that lousy house.

  I had handrails installed.

  The Dr. said they’d fall, they’d fall.

  Squirrels lived in the attic, and once, a blur

  across the rug. Mother said: That’s our mouse.

  She also said, as father lifted couch

  pillows: He’s looking for his teeth.

  I have a box of papers: a deed

  for pastureland, naturalization forms,

  boneyard plots, many pictures, certificates

  of births and deaths—though none of,

  nor for, nor of, you.

  The Milking Stool

  on which my uncle sat

  was painted black.

  He’d call to us: Come close, closer,

  children, she won’t hurt you.

  And we did, and he took an udder

  and pulled it down and angled it up

  to shoot each child—smallest

  to tallest—right between the eyes

  with a gush of warm milk.

  It was a skill the cow didn’t seem to mind.

  Come closer, children, close.

  Four or five of us in a row,

  right between the eyes!