Thomas Lux

which he must cross, by swimming, for fruits and nuts, to help him I sit with my rifle on a platform high in a tree, same side of the river as the hungry monkey. How does this assist him? When he swims for it I look first upriver: predators move faster with the current than against it. If a crocodile is aimed from upriver to eat the monkey and an anaconda from downriver burns with the same ambition, I do the math, algebra, angles, rate-of-monkey, croc- and snake-speed, and if,if it looks as though the anaconda or the croc will reach the monkey before he attains the river’s far bank, I raise my rifle and fire one, two, three, even four times into the river just behind the monkey to hurry him up a little. Shoot the snake, the crocodile? They’re just doing their jobs, but the monkey, the monkey has little hands like a child’s, and the smart ones, in a cage, can be taught to smile.

For some semitropical reason when the rains fall relentlessly they fall into swimming pools, these otherwise bright and scary arachnids. They can swim a little, but not for long and they can’t climb the ladder out. They usually drown—but if you want their favor, if you believe there is justice, a reward for not loving the death of ugly and even dangerous (the eel, hog snake, rats) creatures, if you believe these things, then you would leave a lifebuoy or two in your swimming pool at night. And in the morning you would haul ashore the huddled, hairy survivors and escort them back to the bush, and know, be assured that at least these saved, as individuals, would not turn up again someday in your hat, drawer, or the tangled underworld of your socks, and that even— when your belief in justice merges with your belief in dreams— they may tell the others in a sign language four times as subtle and complicated as man’s that you are good, that you love them, that you would save them again.

hate the people of this village and would nail our hats to our heads for refusing in their presence to remove them or staple our hands to our foreheads for refusing to salute them if we did not hurt them first: mail them packages of rats, mix their flour at night with broken glass. We do this, they do that. They peel the larynx from one of our brothers’ throats. We devein one of their sisters. The quicksand pits they built were good. Our amputation teams were better. We trained some birds to steal their wheat. They sent to us exploding ambassadors of peace. They do this, we do that. We canceled our sheep imports. They no longer bought our blankets. We mocked their greatest poet and when that had no effect we parodied the way they dance which did cause pain, so they, in turn, said our God was leprous, hairless. We do this, they do that. Ten thousand (10,000) years, ten thousand (10,000) brutal, beautiful years.

Tottering and elastic, middle name of Groan, ramfeezled after a hard night at the corpse-polishing plant, slope- shouldered, a half loaf of bread, even his hair tired, famished, fingering the diminished beans in his pocket—you meet him. On a thousand street corners you meet him, emerging from the subway, emerging from your own chest—this sight’s shrill, metallic vapors pass into you. His fear is of being broken, of becoming too dexterous in stripping the last few shoelaces of meat from a chicken’s carcass, of being moved by nothing short of the Fall of Rome, of being stooped in the cranium over some loss he’s forgotten the anniversary of.... You meet him, know his defeat, though proper and inevitable, is not yours, although yours also is proper and inevitable: so many defeats queer and insignificant (as illustration: the first time you lay awake all night waiting for dawn—and were disappointed), so many no-hope exhaustions hidden, their gaze dully glazed inward.—And yet we all fix our binoculars on the horizon’s hazy fear-heaps and cruise toward them, fat sails forward.... You meet him on the corners, in bus stations, on the blind avenues leading neither in nor out of hell, you meet him and with him you walk.

which regenerate their tails and also eat only the tails of other electric eels, presumably smaller, who, in turn, eat ... Without consulting an ichthyologist — eels are fish — I defer to biology’s genius. I know little of their numbers and habitat, other than they are river dwellers. Guess which river. I have only a note, a note taken in reading or fever — I can’t tell, from my handwriting, which. All I know is it seems sensible, sustainable: no fish dies, nobody ever gets so hungry he bites off more than a tail; the sting, the trauma keeps the bitten fish lean and alert. The need to hide while regrowing a tail teaches guile. They’ll eat smaller tails for a while. These eels, these eels themselves are odes!

It’s the little towns I like with their little mills making ratchets and stanchions, elastic web, spindles, you name it. I like them in New England, America, particularly-providing bad jobs good enough to live on, to live in families even: kindergarten, church suppers, beach umbrellas ... The towns are real, so fragile in their loneliness a flood could come along (and floods have) and cut them in two, in half. There is no mayor, the town council’s not prepared for this, three of the four policemen are stranded on their roofs ... and it doesn’t stop raining. The mountain is so thick with water parts of it just slide down on the heifers—soggy, suicidal— in the pastures below. It rains, it rains in these towns and, because there’s no other way, your father gets in a rowboat so he can go to work.

(dirt stolen from an infant’s grave around midnight) Do not try to take it from my child’s grave, nor from the grave of my childhood, nor from any infant’s grave I guard—voodoo, juju, boo-hoo rites calling for it or not! This dust, this dirt, will not be taken at dawn or noon or at the dusky time, and if you approach this sacred place near midnight, then I will chop, one by one, your fingers off with which you do your harm. Goofer-dust: if you want it, if you need it, then erect downwind from a baby’s grave a fine-meshed net and gather it one-half grain, a flaky mote, an infinitesimally small fleck of a flake at a time and in such a way it is given to you by the day, the wind, the world, it is given to you, thereby diminishing the need to steal this dirt displaced by a child in a child’s grave.

“There was poverty before money.” There was debtors’ prison before inmates, there was hunger prefossil, there was pain before a nervous system to convey it to the brain, there existed poverty before intelligence, or accountants, before narration; there was bankruptcy aswirl in nowhere, it was palpable where nothing was palpable, there was repossession in the gasses forming so many billion ... ; there was poverty—it had a tongue—in cooling ash, in marl, and coming loam, thirst in the few strands of hay slipping between a pitchfork’s wide tines, in the reptile and the first birds, poverty aloof and no mystery like God its maker; there was surely want in one steamed and sagging onion, there was poverty in the shard of bread sopped in the final drop of gravy you snatched from your brother’s mouth.

Foreseeing typographical errors on their gravestones, the children from infancy—are bitter. Little clairvoyants, blond, in terror. Foreseeing the black and yellow room behind the eyelids, the children are bitter—from infancy. The blue egg of thirst: say hello. Foreseeing the lower lips of glaciers sliding toward their own lips, the children from infancy—are bitter. Them, rats, snakes: the chased and chasers. Foreseeing a dust-filled matchbox, the heart, the temples’ temples closing, the children are bitter—from infancy. From the marrow in the marrow: the start.

like a downhill brakes-burned freight train full of pig iron ingots, full of lead life-size statues of Richard Nixon, like an avalanche of smoke and black fog lashed by bent pins, the broken-off tips of switchblade knives, the dust of dried offal, remorseless, it comes, faster when you turn your back, faster when you turn to face it, like a fine rain, then colder showers, then downpour to razor sleet, then egg-size hail, fist-size, then jagged laser, shrapnel hail thudding and tearing like footsteps of drunk gods or fathers; it comes polite, loutish, assured, suave, breathing through its mouth (which is a hole eaten by a cave), it comes like an elephant annoyed, like a black mamba terrified, it slides down the valley, grease on grease, like fire eating birds’ nests, like fire melting the fuzz off a baby’s skull, still it comes: mute and gorging, never to cease, insatiable, gorging and mute.