To the Left of Time
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 trade.permissions@hmhco.com 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!